DevOps in 2018

Hopefully, like Caylent, you were able to add your voice to this year’s State of DevOps Report before the deadline on July 8th. DORA and Puppet have been collecting data for over six years for its annual research. In that time, the yearly study has surveyed over 27,000 professionals to date (not yet counting this year’s contributions) looking at the size of the companies involved as well as their level of DevOps engagement and understanding. The report also continually studies global organizational approaches to automation, risk management, and attitudes towards DevOps in depth.

Making Scalability and Automation a Priority

It’s clear that there’s still not an easy-to-follow path for transforming an IT team at an organizational level to improve on deliverables, performance, and risk levels. But each year the Report works harder to close that gap. In the hope that, at companies of all sizes, the work a team does with DevOps is as efficient and stress-free as it could be.

DevOps is a vast and complex field with ever new and evolving issues involving cloud services, business continuity, remote working, and this year’s GDPR hurdle for teams to deal with. It’s becoming increasingly important for managers to plan ahead and to encourage a working environment where best practices are the unspoken norm, rather than something that gets paid lip-service.

Identifying Barriers to Best Practices

Many companies find that when they try to implement DevOps transformations, they run into common barriers. Some developers may still be reluctant to adopt new methodologies for software development. Communication and collaboration move slowly in companies where project and organizational goals are poorly articulated and structured. Continuous monitoring is useful, but it’s often difficult to decide who is responsible for acting on alerts, and what should and should not be monitored. These are all hurdles that are worth endeavoring to overcome and should form a core part of your DevOps plan.

On Closer Examination

Perhaps lesser known, but equally insightful is Puppet’s State of DevOps: Market Segmentation Report. This report deep-dives further into the high-level data discovered by the yearly State of DevOps Report. Findings include the following:

• Deployment automation is the most significant point of pain the majority of organizations (66%) seek to address first.
• IT operations or Infrastructure teams usually start with infrastructure automation and monitoring, whereas DevOps teams tend to distribute their focus more evenly when they begin their DevOps journeys.
• The highest percentage of high performers can be found in India, Japan, and Northern Asia (24%) and Mexico, Central and South America (20%).
• While surprisingly, Canada and the U.S. have the highest percentage of low performers (45%).
• 40% of the surveyed audience revealed that they are still doing manual configuration management and deployment. The tools (and with it, user confidence) are improving in automating these crucial, but repetitive tasks so findings may change in the future.

The research continues to support the yearly State of DevOps findings that organizations of all sizes across the globe are expanding on DevOps practices and seeking improvements.

As the Marketing Segmentation Report states:

“The gains provided by DevOps—getting departments and teams to work better across an organization—is no longer just a “nice to have” but a given. DevOps is simultaneously raising the bar and expectations of what’s possible.”

For more insights, check out the article SRE vs. DevOps.