3 DevOps Trends Set To Dominate 2025

Last year, we witnessed a significant influx of companies transitioning to Cycle from Kubernetes, ECS, and other container platforms. These interactions provided us a front row seat to the evolving culture of DevOps.

This article dives into the three biggest DevOps trends that we see making a big impact in 2025.

1. Developer Experience Leads the Way

Developer experience (DX) refers to the experience developers have using internal systems to get their work done. Every organization has a set of processes and rules in place that they believe will help their developers avoid things like creating security risks through bespoke deployments, causing massive increases to the billing, or just overall compliance processes needed to maintain adherence to a given compliance standard like SOC2.

The benefit of investing in better DX is better developer productivity. From the DevOps side, the key is to look for platforms and practices that drive autonomy while maintaining governance and operational oversight.

For those adopting Cycle, there are several core components that deliver on these principles:

• Standardization: The control plane and worker nodes run our software and are always up to date. Therefore, standardization in these areas is enforced at the platform level itself and there is no need by the organization to implement or enforce here.
• Stacks: The stack file gives users the option to create environments as code. Stacks can be used with pipelines to create GitOps-style deployments which can be set up easily by developers through the Cycle portal or by an ops person for a quick handoff to the developer.
• Access Control Lists and RBAC: This tooling gives users granular control over capabilities and vision for each developer on the platform. Push-button changes and revocation.
• Vertical Toolset: Cycle isn't just being a container orchestrator; it gives users the power to do everything from spin up new servers to assign IPs and DNS records. This reduces the amount of tooling each developer needs to learn and shrinks the amount of surface area for policy enforcement at the organization level.

2. Hybrid Cloud and Repatriation

I don't see a future where the most important workloads are ever run by individual companies with their own colocation racks, definitely not true on-prem racks (unless you're DHH). The cloud is incredible for high availability, redundancy, scalability, and choice. It's incredible to have been a part of this industry for almost a decade now and watched as new products and offerings continue to change what's possible.

However…

For many organizations, especially in the SMB and early enterprise sectors, there is a desire to repatriate certain workloads that don't have extreme needs for what the cloud offers, and in 2025 this will continue to be more and more attractive to cost-sensitive cloud participants.

We saw this come up quite a few times this past year. Organizations looking for a solution that would allow them to run a true hybrid cloud (hyper-scalar and on-prem mix of compute and workloads) or a solution that would give them the flexibility to repatriate if they were to make that choice at any time in the future.

With Cycle, they get the exact same experience running in hyper-scalar environments as they do running on-prem and managing the cluster doesn't require a PhD.

3. A.I. Continues Doing its Thing

“Can I run GPU-powered workloads?” is one of the most popular questions I'm asked when new users are evaluating the platform. The surge in popularity for AI is like nothing we've ever seen before and for good reason.

In the DevOps world, knowing that you can quickly spin up servers and run workloads (short-lived, batch, long-running, etc.) without changing anything about your normal ops workflow can be really relieving. With Cycle, you can not only do all this but you can also do it across multiple different clouds, giving users maximum choice and flexibility. For a lot of our GPU users, that means if their preferred vendor doesn't have stock, they don't have to slow down or wait; they can simply spin up a server from a different provider and keep going!

On the flip side of this, I've also worked with several users who are building more agentic-type systems. On Cycle, they're able to set up elegant self-hosted workflow automation tools quickly. Being able to quickly scale up these systems and being able to run both stateful and stateless workloads side by side make it quick and straightforward for developers to quickly test new ideas and get them into production workflows.

2025 and Beyond

While we can't see into the future, we can see what's happening now and make a good guess about what's to come. It would seem that organizations will continue to be profit-focused, fiscally conservative, and looking to take advantage of more and more automation. While all eyes are definitely on AI, developer experience and cloud architecture are ways that organizations can strategically approach the things they can control and hope to pull in a great ROI on those investments.

Have a trend you think is going to really take off this year? Tell us more about it in our community!

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