An Outlook on DevOps and Platform Engineering for 2025

As everyone has been saying a lot lately, "Happy New Year!"

However what does DevOps and Platform Engineering look like going into 2025? Is there anything exciting that is happening or what are some of the lingering items from last year? These are a few of my general thoughts on things and what I am hoping for this year.

The ever continuing Terraform and OpenTofu discussion

So in general I have always been a fan of Terraform for working with Clouds. Providing the consistent configuration is imperative and since I have worked with multiple different clouds having a consistent configuration language is necessary.

Having worked with CloudFormation, Ansible, and some Packer they all have advantages, but for cloud configuration Terraform has always led it for me.

Overall I am still remaining hopeful for OpenTofu. I think there are advantages to the Open Source option, but I am concerned that it will become, "just another configuration tool."

The move back to the DataCenter

With rising Cloud Costs and some amount of general instability month to month on what the cost will be I am curious to see if there is a push to come back on-prem.

Running a rack in a DataCenter myself for some items there is certainly something nice about knowing exactly what my costs will be each month. There is the downside of data storage and having to manage disks, but with SSDs this feels like less and less of an issue.

Will DevOps fully just become Platform Engineering

This is an interesting one to me. I have never really felt like Platform Engineering is the next evolution of DevOps. To me these still remain like very specific entities as a whole. They focus on different items as a whole.

Platform Engineering to me has always been more concerned with the larger picture of the infrastructure and managing it more widely. DevOps tends to be more so focused on the App Delivery side of things and making sure that the application has what it needs to be successful.

So what do you think is on the horizon to look for this year?