Originally published on CD Foundation.

This was my first contribution to a collaborative CD Foundation blog post. A lot of interesting insights from a very smart group of people. Worth checking out.

“Building and releasing software is complex. Teams want to build software faster. Organizations want to get their products in front of users as soon as possible. To stay competitive, companies invest in automation. To that end, many of them started moving their pipelines to some form of CI/CD.

While your mileage may vary, once you have experienced CI/CD, you don’t want to go back. But what comes next? What are some of the trends that are emerging or making themselves universal?

Although GitOps has been around for a while, it will become ubiquitous. Treating your SDLC as code allows you to adopt well-established software engineering practices. At the same time, it paves the way for Progressive Delivery. Canary Releases, Blue/Green deployments or Feature Flags will become standard practices.

An interesting trend to keep an eye on is the increasing influence of AI and ML in software delivery. They can augment linters, static and dynamic analysis to increase software quality. They can also help detect patterns for potential system issues.

The adoption of eBPF will gain traction and influence how teams monitor and deliver software. Its observability capabilities will provide valuable insights to help teams make decisions.

Global software delivery (e.g. multiple locations around the globe) will become increasingly more important. Operating in a global market will push teams to build and deliver software capable of its unique demands.

Many of these trends will work together. Teams will be able to deliver high-quality software faster.”