Shyam Sreevalsan spoke at the DevOps & Agile Summer Retreat in Latvia in July 2024. His talk, “The Future of DevOps: The Next 10 Years,” was an attempt to lay out a technical roadmap for where the discipline is heading – not vague predictions, but specific shifts already underway.
Three themes anchored the talk. First, AI-driven automation: not replacing engineers, but handling the repetitive diagnostic and remediation tasks that consume on-call time. Second, DevSecOps becoming the default rather than the exception – security as a continuous, embedded practice rather than a gate at the end of a pipeline. Third, decentralized autonomous teams with decentralized tools and workflows, where each team owns its full stack including observability, rather than relying on a central platform team to configure monitoring for them.
The retreat format – smaller group, focused setting – made for better conversations than a typical conference. Attendees were mostly senior practitioners who had seen multiple waves of DevOps tooling come and go. The questions after the talk were sharp: how do you prevent “decentralized” from becoming “inconsistent,” and what happens to observability standards when every team picks its own tools?
