According to the State of DevOps Report 2017, a DevOps implementation can transform your business rapidly by increasing employee productivity by 43 percent, customer experience by 74 percent and above all company growth by 40 percent. So, to stay ahead of the competition, it's high time to kickstart continuous innovation, integration and delivery. And before the inception, it's important to know the top 7 DevOps trends of 2018. Here comes up the list.

1.Serverless Technology Hits the Coast: A constant technology buzz for DevOps this year is going to be serverless technology. Complex implementation details are abstracted in containers and orchestration edges, which in due course are commoditized. It becomes really seamless when configuration of an abstraction layer puts an end to internal technical issues. Adding further to the capabilities, serverless computing and this abstraction would continue to drive the function-asa-service market at a phenomenal rate, thereby growing 33 percent annually, reaching USD 7.72 billion by 2021, predicts Research and Markets.

2.DevOps Bridges Gaps with Security: With an avalanche of cyber-attacks in 2017, IT Security has become a very high priority issue for all applications. Simply developing security features in application is no longer enough; rather the development framework needs to bake security so that even minute loopholes can be patched up later. To enable such 360 security, the transition from DevOps to DevSecOps becomes an absolute necessity. Keeping up to the trend, SAP has already come up with Threat Modelling, where the entire scope of deliverables is analyzed for cyber vulnerabilities.

3.Testers Dirty Hands in Coding: In 2018, when DevOps automation becomes the primary focus, the life of IT professionals becomes even more competitive. No more manual intervention in testing, rather automated test scripts would conquer the market, as it not only increases efficiency, but also ensures faster shipping of features. So, it's high time for testers to update their skillset and stay trendy with new programming skills, and be ready for different testing methodologies, be it black box, white box, code-driven or agile testing. In our company, we are ramping up the testers on similar lines on START (SAP's Test Automation Framework on Selenium) and HP unified Functional Testing.

4. DevOps Automation Becomes the Center of Attention: 2018 is going to be the year to achieve zerotouch automation that is where the entire process is automated and optimized in line with the organization goals. Although it is not about automating everything, but certainly, it is about extending the service so that it can be done when needed. Hence, understanding the 6C's of DevOps and automating steps in between is one of the main DevOps trends of 2018.

5. DevOps Assembly Lines Replaces CI Pipelines: From source control to production, the end-toend application scenario is visualized through pipelines. Continuous Integration (CI) is no longer enough, Continuous Delivery (CD) is what is pitching in. Henceforth, organizations are investing both effort and time in understanding the process of software development process automation. This year, the shift of CI Pipelines to DevOps assembly lines is a forecast.

6. Heart of Agile and Modern Agile Join Hands: With everyday changing needs, organizations have moved far from core DevOps. And with such changes, the once-best methodologies like scrum and agile are soon going to be replaced by or merged with new techniques. Some such new methodologies include Modern Agile and Heart of Agile. While modern agile focuses on making awesome people, rapid learning and experimentation, making safety a prerequisite and continuous delivery of values; heart of agile continues on a four-fold path of collaboration, delivery, reflection and improvement. 2018 will see the handshake of Heart of Agile with Modern Agile.

7. Experimentation Captures the Stage: According to Humble, teams that are punished for failure won't innovate, either in process or in product development. But to unlock new value, innovation is inevitable. In 2018, most DevOps organizations are going to lock down their business and technical metrics, which automatically means provision of valuable safety net for failure. Metrics for collecting and tracking enables companies to try out things that they have never done before and also set risk parameters around those tasks, so that the failure impact is limited. It is no more about preventing failure, rather limiting the stakes for failure when it happens. Tech giants like Google, Netflix, Salesforce, Zoho, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft have already adopted the latest DevOps trends to prepare themselves effectively for this evolving competitive market. It’s time for the rest of us now to kickstart our own customized DevOps workflow. In 2017, many organizations have realized difference in productivity through DevOps adoption. For 2018, DevOps success can be even more remarkable and widespread with the aforementioned sizzling seven DevOps trends.