This was the year that saw GitHub Copilot move from a plug-in on Jetbrain, where it was first launched in 2021, to broad availability for the Visual Studio IDE in March. It was followed by the release of Amazon's code completion service, Code Whisperer, in June, and Replit's Ghostwriter in October. Tabnine, an AI startup for code generation, secured $15.5 million in funding, while another code-completion startup, Kite, died in the wake of Copilot's popularity. And then, too, by the end of the year, it all ended up as a big question mark when GitHub wound up in litigation over its use of open source repositories in Copilot. Although much of the focus in 2022 was on automated coding and code completion, it turns out that AI technologies transformed code in more subtle ways in the past year. "We don't believe we're going to see AI replace DevOps engineers or platform engineers, but really augment them," said Zach Zaro, co-founder and CEO of Coherence, a DevOps automation startup that leverages AI. "You have a lot happening at the application layer level -- AI coming to help developers write application code, not infrastructure code."

DevSecOps tools such as GitLab's One DevOps Platform plan to inject AI into developer workflows to shore up secure coding, a shift IT pros and analysts say is timely as security AI becomes more popular. In IT and security operations, AIOps tools can reduce the number of alerts IT pros must respond to or narrow down the root cause of incidents as distributed cloud-native infrastructure grows more and more complex. The same kind of overload that's led IT ops teams to embrace artificial intelligence and machine learning has creeped into the developer side of the DevSecOps model as well, according to IT analysts. "Cloud services and modern software development processes, such as microservices application architectures, create a much greater scale of software releases and attack exposures," said Melinda Marks, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget. "That, coupled with the cybersecurity skills gap, means that they are looking for ways to reduce tedious, manual tasks to work more efficiently and reduce staff burnout." The movement to shift security left into DevOps workflows is bringing along applications for AI assistance as well, from vendors such as Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud and GitLab.

DevOps platform GitLab today announced that it has acquired UnReview, a machine learning-based tool that helps software teams recommend the best reviewers for when developers want to check in their latest code. GitLab, which is looking to bring more of these machine learning capabilities to its platform, will integrate UnReview's capabilities into its own code review workflow. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition. "Last year we decided that the future of DevOps includes ML/AI, both within the DevOps lifecycle as well as the growth of adoption of ML/AI with our customers," David DeSanto, GitLab's senior director, Product Management – Dev & Sec, told me. He noted that when GitLab recently surveyed its customers, 75% of the teams said they are already using AI/ML.

GitLab announced this week it has acquired UnReview, a provider of a tool that employs machine learning algorithms to both identify which expert code reviewers to assign to a project based on the quality of their previous efforts and current workloads. David DeSanto, senior director for product management at GitLab, said the acquisition of UnReview is the latest step in an AI strategy that, in addition to optimizing DevOps processes, will also eventually unify machine learning operations (MLOps) and DevOps workflows. Accessed via the Dev section of the GitLab platform, UnReview will also be employed to manage the overall code review process. DeSanto said GitLab is committed to employing AI technologies to automate workflows and compressing cycle times across all stages of the DevSecOps life cycle. The goal is to not eliminate the need for DevOps teams but rather eliminate low-level tasks that conspire to hamper productivity, while at the same time improving application security, noted DeSanto.