A survey of over 500 DevOps practitioners finds that approximately 60% of respondents plan to boost investments in DevOps tools and platforms in the next two years, with 20% planning significant budget increases.
The survey was conducted by Techstrong Research, an arm of Techstrong Group, which is also the parent organization of DevOps.com. Respondents indicated areas of investment that organizations are investing in most over the next two years are core DevOps tools and platforms, including testing, code artifact repositories, observability, automated deployment platforms, internal developer portals (IDPs) and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools.
Specifically, just under a third (32%) are planning to replace or upgrade their continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform in the next 12 to 18 months, while 23% are currently assessing their future requirements. However, only 16% are planning to transition to an integrated DevOps platform in the next 12 to 18 months, compared to 37% that already have. Additionally, only 20% have adopted platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps at scale.
Overall, the survey finds that 88% view the future of DevOps as generally positive, with half (50%) describing it as very positive. Only 1.5% of respondents had a negative outlook on DevOps.
Additionally, 62.5% said they view artificial intelligence (AI) as either an extremely or very valuable addition to DevOps workflows. Compared to 10.1% that view AI as either not being very or not at all valuable. Many organizations are already using AI in development today (32.7%), with another 41.5% considering using AI. Only 9% said AI is fully integrated into their DevOps workflows.
Mitch Ashley, principal analyst for Techstrong Research, said the survey makes it clear that while fads fade and other trends vanish, DevOps continues to deliver value to software teams and IT organizations. DevOps also has a long runway ahead regarding investments, with investments in automation, AI and application security driving a wave of additional investments, he added.
In fact, nearly three-quarters (72.7%) of respondents are applying DevOps on 50% or more of their projects, with 18.7% of respondents applying DevOps on all projects. The Build and Test phases of the software development lifecycle are areas that make the most use of DevOps practices at 78.6% and 72.4%, respectively.
A full 81% of respondents identified increases in velocity at which their organization delivers software into production environments as a top benefit of DevOps, with 45.6% describing those increases as being high. A similar percentage (80%) said DevOps also enables their organization to achieve faster times to market.
The survey finds a total of 81% also said DevOps improves developer productivity, with 35% describing those gains as high. DevOps teams are releasing code more frequently, with software delivered into production on a daily (11.8%), weekly (34.1%) and monthly (29%) basis respectively.
Despite those benefits, however, the survey also makes it clear additional improvements to DevOps workflows are needed, with survey respondent rating DevOps impact as low in managing complexity (16.3%), increasing collaboration between silos (14.8%) and improving software security (13%).
In general, the survey finds more than half of our respondents (55.8%) have achieved higher levels of DevOps maturity. Within this group, 34.4% are standardizing DevOps on projects across their organizations, while 21.5% said they have reached a mastery level of best DevOps practices.
In comparison, 18.1% indicated they are piloting DevOps on a subset of projects, while 21.8% are applying DevOps learnings across multiple projects.
The survey makes it clear that organizations continue to embrace best DevOps practices as they see fit. The one certain thing, however, is, to varying degrees, DevOps is now more indispensable than ever.
For more information, download a copy of the DevOps Next report here.
