DevOps
DevOps is growing in popularity with more developers getting involved. The ultimate goal of DevOps is to simplify the software delivery process.
DevOps, although it doesn’t have a universal definition, is a collection of practices that allow developers to release frequent, small updates to their software, safely and reliably. These practices are supported and supported by a larger DevOps culture, which includes activities, technologies and dedicated platforms that work together to achieve the DevOps overarching goal of streamlining the software delivery process.
This blog post will highlight key points from our global survey wave as well as the responses of 14,000 developers to questions about DevOps that were asked between December 2021 to February 2022. We’ll also be reviewing findings from the free 19th Edition State of the Developer Nation chapter “Who is into DevOps?”
If you are still interested in learning more about DevOps, we would be happy to inform you that we have expanded our DevOps research so you can find answers to questions such as:
- These are the DevOps technologies that developers evaluated, along with new tools: Atlassian. AWS. Azure. GitLab. Google Cloud. Heroku. JFrog. Oracle.
- What DevOps products and plans are developers using?
- Organisational approaches to application security
- What vendors are using which application security tools
- These are the processes developers use for cloud-native apps security
- Top security concerns for developers
What are the most recent insights into DevOps
Our latest report, “Landscape and Trends in DevOps”, examines the current landscape and trends in DevOps as seen from developers’ perspectives. We want to find out who these developers really are and what DevOps activities lead to better software delivery process performance.
These are the highlights of the analysis.
- 77% of developers surveyed are involved with DevOps
- Involvement in multiple DevOps activities/technologies is predictive of higher software delivery performance
- From Q3 2021 to Qu1 2022, the average number of DevOps technology used by DevOps practitioners increased from 4.2 to 4.6%.
This last point means that DevOps practitioners have used nearly 10% more technologies. DevOps professionals are also gradually being exposed to more activities. Each DevOps activity is examined separately and we see a marked increase in participation over the past six months.
Who is interested in DevOps and why?
We asked developers to answer the question, and all subsequent ones, whether they were involved in any of the activities commonly covered by DevOps. These activities include continuous integration, deployment, and application and infrastructure monitoring. We only consider developers who are experts in at least one software area. This section is based on our State of the Developer Nation 19th Edition, which was published in Q3 2020. Contact us to get the most recent insights.
First, it is important to recognize that DevOps is becoming more popular among professionals. This is despite the fact that DevOps is still a relatively new movement. Our data shows that 82 percent of professional developers are involved in DevOps. Just over half (52%) are not professionals and participate in one of the DevOps activities.img alt=”Which one of the following development activities are your involved in?”
While most professional developers are involved with DevOps they don’t necessarily consider themselves DevOps practitioners.
One separate survey looked at engagement with DevOps. Only one fifth of developers said they worked on DevOps. They were specifically asked about their involvement and knowledge in emerging areas like blockchain applications, quantum computing, and others. Even including those who stated that they are learning more about DevOps or are interested, only 65% of respondents consider themselves to be actively involved in the topic. This indicates that while a significant portion of developers have adopted DevOps practices, they are not necessarily self-identifying with the term.
We find that DevOps is a lifecycle in which developers are involved in every step of software development. Continuous integration (CI) is the most popular DevOps development process, with 40% of respondents using it. Another 37% of respondents use continuous delivery (or deployment) which builds on CI and automatically deploys all code changes to production or staging environments.
But, automation of the software release process and therefore true DevOps commitment is still far away. Although more than half of developers (52%) use CI/CD to streamline their workflows, only 25% of them use both to automate every step from integrating code changes to a central repository to production deployment. It turns out that developers still have reservations about fully automated CD/CI pipelines. Nearly 40% of them give permission for code deployments to go to production.
39% of developers perform application and infrastructure monitoring. However, infrastructure provisioning management (27%), is still the domain of IT managers and system administrators. Similarly, automated testing (25%) or building CI/CD pipelines (23%), are specialized tasks that are mainly performed by solution architects and quality assurance professionals.
When it comes to organisational roles, our research shows that there are significant differences in DevOps adoption. Depending on the developer’s title, involvement in any DevOps activity. The highest involvement in DevOps activities is reported by technical company leaders, such as CIOs, CTOs and IT managers. Nearly all developers who hold a technical leadership role, or 95%, participate in at least one DevOps activity.
Programmers have largely adopted CI/CD processes but not other DevOps methods.
Specialist roles such as system administrators, network security engineers, QA and QA developers are the next tier in DevOps adoption. These positions are associated in some way with DevOps culture. Between 86% to 91% of the developers who hold them are from this tier. It is important to note that not all architects are involved in the DevOps culture. They appear to be involved in all phases and stages of the DevOps process. Other specialists tend to be more focused on the activities that are relevant to their areas of expertise. System administrators, for example, are focused on infrastructure monitoring and provisioning, while QA engineers focus more on automated testing of CI/CD pipelines.
Our survey found that 61% of respondents were front-line developers and coders. However, 81% are more likely than the average professional to be involved with DevOps activities. Our data shows that software developers are eager to adopt CI/CD practices, but not operational practices like monitoring applications in production environments. This again shows that the shift to DevOps culture is not complete. Programmers are not responsible for any additional phases of the product’s lifecycle beyond those that are central to their roles.
The software industries that developers are involved in is another important indicator of how engaged they are with DevOps. We see interesting differences in DevOps adoption between sectors, just like roles. DevOps is embraced by nearly 90% of third-party ecosystem developers and backend service developers, compared to less than 80% for game developers.
This is partially due to the vast amount of coding experience needed to implement DevOps. Our data shows that DevOps professionals are more skilled coders than those who have not been involved in any DevOps activity. Developers who work on apps for third party ecosystems, backend service, and industrial IoT projects are some of the most skilled in the software industry. 85% have at least three years of coding experience. Only 73% of game developers are comparable.
However, desktop app developers are not as likely to adopt DevOps practices despite being highly skilled professionals with at least three years experience in software development. This shows that DevOps is not aligned with all the benefits. Applications running on desktops typically get updates at a lower rate than those that run in other environments (e.g. servers. Desktop application projects are not able to use the DevOps strategy, which entails releasing small updates at high velocity.
DevOps is a cultural shift that allows developers from different teams to work together in order to produce software more quickly and reliably. Although the DevOps approach is widely accepted by professional developers in all software industries and roles, there are significant differences in how they focus on particular activities. These variations show that not all developers have embraced the DevOps culture. In some cases, many developers remain focused on core aspects of their roles and do not take responsibility for other phases of product life cycles.