This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the 2018 DZone Guide to DevOps: Culture and Process.

Introduction

For this year's DZone Guide to DevOps, we surveyed 549 software professionals to find out their thoughts on various aspects of DevOps. In this article, we focus on that data around DevOps adoption. 

Adoption Rates

Compared to results from DZone’s DevOps survey in 2017, it has been a pretty stagnant year for DevOps adoption. Last year we saw an increase in organizations with dedicated DevOps teams (up 7% from the year before); respondents who thought their organization had achieved Continuous Delivery for at least some of their projects went up 9%; CD pipelines across the SDLC and push-button deployments both increased (5% and 4%, respectively); the use of version control and CI tools in QA and production groups all had double-digit growth, around 15%.

This year, most of our questions around the adoption or use of DevOps practices, processes, or tools saw either statistically insignificant change or decrease (with a few exceptions discussed later). The percentage of organizations with dedicated DevOps teams only increased by 1%; respondents who believed their organization had achieved CD decreased a net 7% (respondents who thought their organization had achieved CD for all projects increased from 14% to 18%, but the respondents who believed their org had achieved CD for certain projects decreased from 39% to 28%). CI/CD pipelines for the whole SDLC and push-button deploys increased only 2% year-over-year, and while QA groups increased their usage of CI tools by 4% — just outside the margin of error — no other group (between development, QA, and production) had statistically significant changes in the use of version/source control, issue tracking, CI, or configuration management tools. 

Notable changes this year revolved mostly around practices and tools that might help make DevOps goals, such as Continuous Delivery, more achievable. We’ve seen, as we will describe later, fairly massive increases in the adoption of microservice architectures and container technologies, which correlate directly to DevOps practices and benefits.

Conclusion

Could this stagnant state of affairs for DevOps adoption be due to the ubiquity of the methodology in the tech industry? Or, to put it another way, will DevOps adoption rates continue to plateau because everyone is already using DevOps? 

Give us your thoughts below!

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the 2018 DZone Guide to DevOps: Culture and Process.