Managing the cloud and hardware/infrastructure were the two tasks most frequently named, and they were split best no code app builder nearly evenly down the middle, with roughly 50% of ops pros focusing on one or the other task primarily. Another area – maintaining the toolchain – is apparently now a job shared with developers, as devs also told us they were spending more time on toolchain maintenance and integration than ever before. That’s not surprising: 44% of teams reported they use between two and five tools, while 41% use between six and 10 tools. That’s a lot of tools, which is clearly one reason for the added ops support. IT operations will become more automated, not less. The use of human labor will fall into two categories. One category is that work which requires creativity and imagination, for example system design and incident troubleshooting. The other category is work which is predictable and repetitive—requirements gathering and capacity planning. Eventually all predictable and repetitive work will be automated. It’s the nature of the dynamic. If machine intelligence can observe a pattern for a long enough period of time, eventually the machine intelligence can emulate the pattern—think speak recognition.