The Top Three Benefits of Continuous Delivery

as i wrote about in my previous post, elasticbox, and devops.com interviewed over 300, devops specialists, engineers, and it executives for their 2015 study titled: the real value of devops. the research revealed that continuous integration and continuous delivery drive the biggest devops usage across organization of all sizes. it’s interesting to know whether the it community thinks of ci/cd as a devops initiative. to better understand the ci/cd landscape, they asked what tools they use, how long they’ve used them, and what benefits they gain from implementing ci/cd.

ci/cd investment

not surprisingly and in line with other finding from the survey, when asked if their company invests of plans to invest in ci/cd tools, over 57% answered affirmatively. perhaps a bigger surprise is that nearly a quarter answered they were not sure.

ci/cd usage

again no surprise here. when it comes to tool used, jenkins leads with 75& responses with go and travis ci at 20% and 16% respectively. about 27% of respondents combined chose bamboo, teamcity, team foundation server, and urbancode.

automation phase

as another indication that ci/cd dominates the devops space, over 64% said they already rolled out, selected their tool, or achieved full ci/cd automation. another 19% said they’d decided on the tools they would roll out soon.

benefits of ci/cd

respondents identified the top three benefits of ci/cd:

• increasing deployments frequency
• increasing release/ship frequency
• decreasing number of broken builds going into production

over 60% of respondents cited these benefits. increasing frequency of deployments came in at 80%

as a devops initiative

the survey indicates that over 80% identify ci/cd as part of their devops initiative with less than 10% who said it was their only devops initiative.

the survey pinpoints ci/cd as the dominant devops solution being implemented right now. while it has not yet reached 75% market penetration, it appears to be approaching critical mass with jenkins established as the leading solution. its benefits address the pain points of application development and delivery that are a critical component to achieving business agility.