It’s the end of 2013 and the year is closing out on an industry that has discovered that the nature of DevOps is a multi-layered highly-channeled experience that has been changing the face of IT and development.

DevOps relies on tools that abstract away manual hands-on involvement in deployment and testing processes by automatically configuring software cycles—but at the same time give the managing team insights into what’s going on beneath the hood. In this way it allows developers to automate large portions of operations The cloud has been a huge driver in 2013 and SiliconANGLE’s own crystal ball suggests that private, public, and hybrid clouds will continue to be a huge component of development in 2014.

So we went out into the industry and talked to the movers-and-shakers about what we can expect from the CloudOps and DevOps in the upcoming year.

From Coverity

The cloud is a different place than on premise servers carefully tuned and bred for a specific task. Deploying into even a private cloud can be an experience that can put any DevOps team under stress. To reduce this stress, Coverity delivers numerous solutions that work with developers to detect and reveal bugs and security flaws early in the development process via entrenched testing.

“Software quality and security become even more important because the application is able to reach more people, which means issues become even more widespread,” says Zack Samocha, Senior Director of Product Management, Coverity.

“Testing as part of the software development process to make the application ‘cloud-ready’ becomes imperative.” In the big-bad-future of the cloud in 2014, testing will no doubt continue to be a rolling thunderclap in the ears of developers seeking the best quality control for their products.

From Sauce Labs

That rumble for testing is no less for Sauce Labs, providers of a powerful suite of tools that provide nimble testing solutions across numerous platforms—from JavaScript, mobile, manual, and the cloud. In the cloud, Sauce Labs Selenium product is one of the most scalable QA products on the market and that makes them an excellent leader to listen to when it comes to the dominance of DevOps and cloud in 2014.

“Building a startup historically involved building custom stacks and gluing stuff together in order to get a website up and running,” says Adam Christian, VP of Development, Sauce Labs. “These days the cloud has given us tools to get an organization off the ground and can serve a relatively large user footprint in minutes. Now we have the opportunity to push the envelope of creativity and see what the new technologies we are getting can do. WebRTC, for example, shows a lot of promise in taking social applications to the next level”

Further on the subject of cloud-services, Christian adds: “I think developers are saving huge amounts of time and energy using cloud services, which allows them to focus on solving the real problems at hand. I see no reason for that to stop. He too agrees that testing will remain extremely important in the cloud-future to any IT company seeking to make their mark in the industry.

“In fact, I see a new start everyday, biting off pieces of the operations headache and turning it into a cloud service. Sauce Labs is established in its role of taking the weight of client testing off the shoulders of developers, and we continue to work hard to make app client testing as simple and straight forward as possible.”

Since cloud-services can readily scale, virtualize, and abstract away those operations automation processes mentioned above, the cloud will become ever more present in DevOps. And this means that being able to test against those cloud-services will need scalable, trustworthy services to assure quality when software is catapulted into that environment.

From JumpCloud

JumpCloud is a leading provider of software to ease server management in the cloud. First seen at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September when the company brought its product out of beta. JumpCloud works to make operations in the cloud easier by combining user management with performance checks and alerting.

“Enterprises have been embracing cloud a great deal,” says Rajat Bhargava, CEO, JumpCloud. “The initial challenges of data security and multi-tenant concerns are slowly giving way to the benefits of increased agility and flexibility. Also, companies such as JumpCloud and others are adding critical security components to their products to help organizations feel and be more safe utilizing the cloud.”

To the focus of services (and –as-a-service) providing that cloud-abstraction, Bhargava cites IaaS/PaaS infrastructure as a “tectonic shift” that has drive DevOps culture into the position it now holds. Big companies in the industry has been reaching out to buy entire data centers, or even virtualize data centers via software-led infrastructure, and it’s DevOps teams who are reaping the benefits.

“The IaaS infrastructure (and PaaS) have been significant enablers to DevOps. Without the ability to automate the creation of new infrastructure and turn what used to be manual process into API calls or code driven enablement, DevOps would not be where it is today without that as a fundamental underpinning… Operations personnel get the benefit of focusing their attention on building and managing scale versus procuring and provisioning hardware and applications. In short, the tectonic shift of DevOps will automate the deployment and management of IT applications and enable organizations to focus more squarely on the innovation.”

“Enterprise has lagged behind in the adoption of agile and other progressive development philosophies,” adds Christopher (Topher) Marie, Vice President of Engineering, JumpCloud, “and I imagine that will continue with the DevOps trends. Entrenched interests and “not built here” syndrome will cause the enterprise to follow instead of lead in this area.”

As mentioned above, a lot of technology has been shifted with the intent of “abstracting away ops” so that developers can get back to the task at hand (developing.) Cloud-providers will want to be able to offer up the tools to make that happen in the most efficient way possible.

James Brown, Chief Experience Officer, JumpCloud closes with that prediction: “For cloud providers, especially providers that specialize in providing direct, hands-on support for their customers, JumpCloud, and tools like it, will help drive down the costs of providing ongoing maintenance and management support for their customers while improving quality and consistency across all their customers.”