The gap between the number of organizations that have invested in DevOps is starting to narrow, and IT organizations that made the transition to DevOps earlier are starting to see accelerated returns on that investment, according to the latest survey by Puppet.
The annual “State of DevOps Report” finds that out of 3,200 IT professionals surveyed, only 11 percent were part of organizations that could be considered high DevOps performers. High performers are deemed to have higher deployment frequencies, lower lead times for changes, better mean time to recovery (MTTR) and better change failure rates. The higher performers in this year’s survey are deploying applications 46 times faster than the same designated group of higher performers were last year.
The survey also finds that higher-performing organizations have automated 72 percent of all configuration management processes. Those same high performers spend much less time (28 percent) employing manual configuration processes. Lower performers are spending almost half of their time (46 percent) on manual configuration.
Just over a quarter (27 percent) of the respondents self-identified themselves as being part of a DevOps team, according to the survey. In contrast, only 16 percent said the same last year. Puppet CTO Nigel Kersten says those results suggest that understanding of the power of DevOps is increasing. It’s also apparent the early implementers of DevOps processes are enjoying a level of IT agility that is much greater than the average IT organization.
In general, Kersten says that while much DevOps progress has been made, most IT organizations have automated only various pockets of silos. Developers, for example, may have automated some processes on their own, while IT operations specialists may have developed a custom script to automate the configuration of a handful of servers. Kersten notes IT leaders should be cognizant of the technical debt their organizations are incurring every time different elements of the IT organization employ different tools to automate the same basic processes time and again.
Very few have automated their operations within the context of a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, says Kersten. That becomes more challenging to accomplish as new computing models based on containers, for example, are added to the enterprise mix. On a more positive note, Kersten says more processes are being well-defined, as they are bounded by an application programming interface (APIs). Those APIs then become the core technology over which IT automation frameworks are then laid.
The issue many IT organizations have yet to confront is the degree to which they want to stumble toward DevOps versus implementing a concerted plan of action. Much of the DevOps progress to date has been driven from the bottom up inside many organizations. The time is now approaching for IT leaders to imbue DevOps as a part of the IT culture that permeates the entire organization.
To one degree or another it’s a safe bet every organization will implement some form of DevOps going forward. The challenge will be figuring out how to transform all those isolated instances into something more akin to an actual IT strategy.
