A global survey of more than 10,000 developers conducted by the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) finds 83% of developers are involved in DevOps-related activities, with a third (33%) actively using continuous integrations tools, monitoring tools to track infrastructure performance and testing applications for security vulnerabilities.
Revealed today at the cdcon event, another 29% of respondents said they were actively involved in continuous delivery/deployment. The most widely used DevOps tools and platforms are source control management (29%) and issue tracking (28%), but only (21%) said they build continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
According to Mark Waite, community manager for CloudBees, the survey results said that while DevOps practices are widespread there is a clear need for organizations to achieve higher levels of maturity given the uneven adoption of best practices. For example, only a quarter (25%) of respondents said they programmatically manage infrastructure.
Overall, the survey suggests that organizations are on a DevOps journey that results in specific DevOps practices being adopted to meet unique requirements versus adopting a set of standards that are universally applied, Waite noted.
For example, the survey finds only 14% of respondents implement code changes daily, while another 17% require less than a week. More than two-thirds (68%) require a week or more, the survey finds. Similarly, only 9% deploy code multiple times a day, while another 20% are somewhere from once per hour to once per week. Only 11% said they could restore a service in less than an hour.
Those percentages have remained relatively consistent for the three years the CDF has been conducting this survey. However, the survey indicates that organizations that use managed CI/CD platforms are slightly more productive than organizations managing these platforms themselves. However, the report also notes that organizations using multiple CI/CD platforms tend to be less productive than those that have standardized on a single platform.
It’s not clear to what degree organizations are coping with the rise of platform engineering. The methodology, meant to manage DevOps workflows at scale, is standardizing DevOps tools and platforms. Historically, each DevOps team has tended to prefer whichever tools and platforms it selects, but over time multiple platforms can result in both higher levels of friction and increased costs.
Ultimately, no one-size approach to DevOps fits every organization. The one thing organizations that are committed to DevOps share is a commitment to higher levels of automation. In fact, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) the next era of DevOps is dawning.
In the meantime, finding and retaining software engineers remains an issue. There has been an ongoing effort to shift more responsibility for IT operations toward developers. However, as the cognitive load placed on developers increases, the amount of time they have to write code decreases. Not every developer writes code 100% of the time, but the less time developers spend focused on code the less productive they will be in terms of the amount of code that make it into a production environment. The challenge, as always, is striking the right DevOps balance.
