A report published by Harness, a provider of continuous delivery (CD) platform accessed via the cloud, finds organizations are spending on average $109,0000 per year just to deploy per application.
Based on a survey of more than 100 organizations, the report finds organizations are struggling with deployment frequency, lead time and meantime to recover after a failed release.
On average, organizations are deploying code to production every four days, which takes about eight hours to complete, according to the report. An average of 11% of those deployments fail and those failures take an average of 60 minutes to manually roll back.
Steve Burton, CMO at Harness, said that while a lot of progress has been made in recent years in terms of implementing continuous integration (CI), the continuous delivery (CD) side of the DevOps equation remains challenging. Each platform an application gets deployed on is a unique “snowflake” that requires organizations to rely on custom scripts to deploy an application. The report finds deployment pipelines are expensive to create and maintain, requiring two to three dedicated full-time employees and up to 66 hours to onboard a new application. New artifacts on average took 5.5 hours to reach production and then 10 hours per deployment.
Harness has been making a case for a dedicated CD platform that is accessed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. That approach provides a way to automate application delivery in a way that more easily complements the variety of tools and platforms organizations rely on to build applications, he said.
The Harness report finds 71% of respondents employ the Jenkins CI/CD platform. Other popular tools and platforms include Jira project management software (76%), Selenium for testing (63%) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud deployment (65%). While Jenkins can be employed to deliver applications, Burton said the survey results make it clear there’s not been a lot of progress when it comes to CD.
It’s too early to say to what degree changing economic conditions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic might encourage IT organizations to rethink their approach to DevOps. Organizations are undoubtedly going to be more sensitive to cost. Much of the cost involved in DevOps comes from first standing up and maintaining the DevOps environment and then hiring IT professionals with DevOps skills to manage it. A SaaS platform, in contrast, is maintained by the provider, comes with built-in analytics tools, enables automatic rollbacks and is paid for on a consumption basis, notes Burton.
No one knows for sure at what rate organizations might be rolling out new applications in the months ahead. While some may choose to pull back, others are advancing various digital business initiatives as part of an effort to become more resilient. In many cases, that means replacing many legacy applications with fewer modern applications that run natively in the cloud.
Regardless of the path forward, the one thing that is certain is the level of scrutiny being applied to DevOps efficiency is about to substantially increase.
