Top 10 DevOps trends to watch in 2026

The evolution of DevOps

DevOps teams are implementing more AI and automation to work faster and smarter and to make more cost-effective deployment decisions -- all of which are needed to meet business and market demands.

DevOps is an approach to software development that brings developers and IT operations professionals together to foster continuous collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). The belief is that such collaboration accelerates software delivery and creates a better, more reliable product.

The approach has evolved since it was conceived in the late aughts, with best practices and technologies emerging over the years. As a result, DevOps today is an automated, AI-enhanced operating model that enables continuous delivery of quality software. It's supported by tools for CI/CD, orchestration and observability into performance.

The DevOps transformation in 2026 will bring further improvements in how these teams perform, making it imperative for organizations to understand and adopt trends in this space to avoid falling behind competitors.

"Companies need to mature in terms of how they adopt automation and how well they integrate it with the way they develop software," said Andrew Cornwall, senior analyst with Forrester Research. "The benefits of doing so are faster time to market, reduced costs and improved quality."

10 DevOps trends to watch

1. Increasing use of AI and automation in the SDLC

This is the most consequential trend in DevOps today, according to multiple experts, and it's driving many of the other trends impacting DevOps now as well.

"The big umbrella trend is more AI, more AI agents, more automation in the software development lifecycle," said Seth Robinson, vice president of industry research for CompTIA, an IT trade organization offering training and certifications.

2. Faster software development and deployment

AI capabilities, including vibe coding tools that let developers use natural language prompts to generate code in any programming language, are dramatically increasing the speed at which software can be developed, tested and deployed. "That time is going to be crashed by 50% to 60%," said Niranjan Ramsunder, CTO and head of data services for UST, a digital technology services company.

"You're getting development done so much faster, and now you have pressure on the remaining parts of the organization to [adopt it] and get value quickly," he added.

3. Platform teams join the DevOps crew

A platform team builds and maintains the infrastructure, tools and services -- which make up the platform -- that DevOps teams use to build, deploy and run their software products.

Many more DevOps teams will see the platform team join their ranks, Cornwall said. And for good reason: "You need someone who is well versed in the technologies," he explained, noting that platform teams help reduce redundancies in infrastructure, tools and services and optimize their use.

He described these platform teams as being "providers of services that are commonly used so all DevOps teams [within an organization] can use the same components."

4. Process change

As with any transformation, the one in DevOps also involves process change.

"AI within DevOps really alters the fundamental process of development," Robinson said, noting that AI in general and soon AI agents will mean reimagining how software moves from requirements gathering to development to production. "That will reshape how DevOps takes place and the best practices that exist today," he added.

5. Consolidation of DevOps tools

As more organizations integrate platform teams into DevOps and adjust DevOps processes to optimize AI use, they'll also consolidate the SDLC tools they're using, Cornwall said. Organizations will move away from a collection of specialized tools to one or a few, which is generally easier to manage and support.

6. Smarter tools

Organizations can expect the tools they use to become smarter as more vendors incorporate AI into their products, Ramsunder said. These smarter technologies are taking on tasks that DevOps teams once had to handle. For example, AI in monitoring tools can often identify technical problems before they become business problems, and the AI in such tools will increasingly be able to fix them on its own using self-healing capabilities.

7. Intent-driven infrastructure

Developers on DevOps teams typically have had to think about architecture as they built their software and work with their operations counterparts to configure infrastructure -- i.e., infrastructure as code. "That's not going to be the case now. Now there are developer platforms where you just literally deploy, and everything is configured," said Dave West, product owner and CEO of Scrum.org, a training and certification organization.

This is intent-driven infrastructure, where AI analyzes workloads and determines the best environment rather than requiring human engineers to determine and configure it.

8. Cost considerations in deployment choices

Many organizations are scrutinizing their cloud spending more aggressively, as that spending has spiked in recent years, so DevOps teams are increasingly expected to use their tools to develop software that runs cost-effectively -- even and especially as software use scales up, Ramsunder said. "The business doesn't want surprises on what it costs to run software," he added.

9. Shifting skills and responsibilities for DevOps teams

The increasing use of AI and automation in the SDLC means DevOps team members will see their responsibilities shift, along with the skills they need to do their jobs. "The roles will change significantly, and IT needs to prepare workers for this new world as AI does more work," Ramsunder said.

For example, Robinson said DevOps teams will need stronger data skills to ensure the AI used in their practice is properly trained and performs as needed.

Meanwhile, Cornwall said individual team members can expect their responsibilities to broaden as AI takes on more of the tasks they historically handled, giving them time to do different, higher-value work.

10. Geopolitically driven decisions

Regulations and geopolitical issues will lead a growing number of organizations to require that the servers hosting the platforms and data used by DevOps teams, as well as the software they produce, reside in the organization's own country, Cornwall said.

The future of DevOps

It's clear that DevOps teams and the work they do are undergoing significant change, but by nearly all accounts, organizations will continue to need them. AI won't take all their work.

In fact, Robinson said he sees more organizations building internal software development capabilities to customize software and deploy automation and AI. And many of those organizations are adopting DevOps to take on that work.

West likewise sees a future for DevOps teams, even as AI eventually enables workers throughout a typical organization to build software themselves.

"That doesn't mean we'll see the end of developers; they'll spend more time worrying about business problems and less time thinking about container models," he said, noting that DevOps teams in the future will spend more time abstracting a problem than writing code. "That's where developers will spend most of their time."

He added, "We will still need DevOps teams. I think we'll need a lot less of them, but they'll take advantage of this technology to deliver a lot more value to their organizations."

Mary K. Pratt is an award-winning freelance journalist with a focus on covering enterprise IT and cybersecurity management.