Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: GitHub touts unbelievable AI stats, and Intel’s beautiful open source typeface. (more…)
Tag: DevOps Survey
-
92% of Devs Use AI, Survey Says ¦ Intel One Mono Font
-
SRE Survey Reveals Major Technical and Cultural Challenges
Catchpoint, in partnership with Blameless, today published an annual survey of 559 site reliability engineers (SREs) that found 59% of respondents didn’t view tool sprawl to be a major concern. Another 40% said tool sprawl is a moderate (33%) to serious problem (8%).
More than half of respondents said they build as much as 30% of the tools they use themselves, with more than half (54%) noting their organization tracks three or more different types of telemetry data to drive observability. The top three types of telemetry data collected are infrastructure (62%), application (58%) and network monitoring (55%) and, on average, the survey suggested the median toil level of SREs dropped 5% year-over-year.
Just under half of respondents (46%) also noted they saw no or low value from artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) compared to 30% that have seen moderate to high value. Another 25% are still unsure.
Finally, the survey concluded that organizations that have adopted a “just culture”—where organizations ensure that incident reporting is not met with punitive measures—are 500% more likely to be Elite performers in terms of the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics defined by Google.
Leo Vasilou, director of product marketing for Catchpoint, said that the survey results provided some insights into the challenges SREs face as they strike a balance between trying to achieve DevOps goals and the fact that hiring has become more constrained during an economic downturn.
That stress, however, has less to do with managing toolchains than it does ensuring that applications driving critical business processes are consistently available, he noted.
SREs have emerged as a distinct DevOps function in recent years, focused almost exclusively on programmatically managing the dependencies that exist between a wide range of applications and the underlying infrastructure upon which they depend. Optimizing applications in the cloud-native era has become more challenging because the number of dependencies that exist between the microservices that make up a modern distributed computing environment continues to exponentially increase. In many cases, applications are continually added to IT environments without a commensurate increase in the overall size of the SRE team.
Regardless of the economic climate, hiring and retaining SREs remains a challenge given the demand for IT professionals with those skills. Of course, there is no formal SRE certificate that is widely recognized so who qualifies to be an SRE tends to vary from one organization to the next. The one thing that is generally agreed upon is that SRE automate a wide range of tasks that would otherwise require multiple IT administrators to perform. Glassdoor also reports that, on average, an SRE makes north of about $125,000, which ranks among the highest salary level within any IT organization.
Each organization, depending on their geographic region, would need to determine how many IT administrators they could replace if they hired an SRE. That doesn’t mean IT administrators that rely on a wide range of graphical tools to manage IT tasks are going away any time soon, but as DevOps continues to evolve, the dynamics between SRE and IT administrators also will continue to evolve.
-
Atlassian Survey Shows Lack of Collaboration in Software Development
A survey of 750 IT and engineering leaders found that while a full 83% of respondents agree that interdepartmental communication is critical for successful software development, only 41% of respondents view cross-collaboration to be a priority.
The survey gathered responses from within organizations that generated more than $50 million in annual revenue and was conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Atlassian.
Overall, more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) said more departments than ever are involved with software development. Overall, 80% said they need to improve collaboration with other departments, but 82% don’t feel particularly confident about their ability to accomplish that goal. Three quarters (75%) also noted the need to improve collaboration within their own department.
Well under half of the respondents (42%) said their culture, processes and tools enable the real-time teamwork and free-flowing information that help leaders make sound decisions.
Among the subset of respondents that are highly collaborative, however, more than (53%) said they see greater customer satisfaction, with 59% reporting increased revenue because of that increased customer satisfaction.
Suzie Prince, head of product for DevOps at Atlassian, said the challenge organizations face is finding a way to successfully employ a mix of synchronous versus asynchronous communication mediums to better enable collaboration. In fact, collaboration as part of any DevOps culture needs to be a C-level discussion to consistently accelerate the rate at which software can be developed and deployed, she added. The core issue is that not every management team is equally comfortable with open communications between the various departments that make up an organization, said Prince.
It’s critical for C-level executives to set that tone and lead by example; DevOps best practices can’t only be adhered to by development teams. The entire business needs to embrace DevOps best practices as an operating model for the business to really attain the maximum benefit.
Unfortunately, DevOps practices within development teams have been unevenly adopted, so it’s often very difficult to get the rest of the business to embrace DevOps principles. Organizations that do embrace DevOps, however, tend to be much further down the path toward becoming a digital business and can more adroitly take advantage of business opportunities as they arise or shift strategy as changing business conditions may warrant. In fact, organizations that embraced DevOps best practices arguably fared better during the economic decline that followed the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic that took every business and IT leader by surprise.
It’s not clear from the Atlassian survey results if a DevOps divide is starting to emerge that makes some organizations more competitive than their rivals. In theory, at least, if every organization is now a software company that happens to build something or deliver a service, then the faster they can reliably build and deliver applications the greater the competitive advantage they can attain and sustain.
There are, of course, a whole host of factors that determine how competitive any organization might be. However, in the age of digital business transformation, it’s clear that being able to build and deploy software at a fairly regular cadence is the new table stakes required for simple survival.
-
DevOps Jobs Remain in High Demand, Survey Shows
There’s good news for those interested in a career in DevOps or development — there are plenty of opportunities. And there’s even room for those with unconventional backgrounds, according to a newly released report from CodinGame.
The CodinGame Developer Survey 2021, which is based on responses from 15,000 international developers and HR professionals, found that 64% of companies hope to hire up to 50 developers this year, while 14% of organizations hope to hire between 50 and 100 developers and nearly another 14% hope to hire more than 100 developers. Five percent of respondents plan to hire more than 500 developers.
Developers know that opportunity abounds, and their confidence was reflected in the survey. When asked the question, “On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being extremely difficult and 10 being extremely easy, how easy do you think it is to change jobs as a developer?” developers surveyed gave an average answer of 7. “Despite the difficulties 2020 has thrown at the world, developers are just as confident this year as they were last year (in our 2020 survey, developers also gave an average score of 7 out of 10),” the report said.
Where HR Anticipates Hiring Challenges
When asked, HR professionals believe that they will have the biggest challenge filling DevOps, back-end developer and full-stack developer positions this year. Roughly 43% of respondents said they will struggle to hire DevOps professionals. When it came to front-end and full-stack developers, 41% said they will have challenges hiring both classes of developers. A full one-third of respondents said it would be a struggle to hire architects.
According to the survey, tester, CTO, data or business analyst, applications developer, mobile developer and systems engineer are among the easiest positions to fill, with 15% or fewer respondents citing those positions as challenging to fill.
Still, whether they are relatively easy to fill or not, almost all of these positions are heavily sought after. In order of demand, according to respondents:
- DevOps
- Back-end developers
- Full-stack developers
- Architect
- Software developer
- Data scientist/Machine learning specialist
- Front-end developer
- Tester
- CTO
- Data or business analyst
- Applications developer
- Mobile developer
- Systems engineer
“These rankings confirm changes many of us have been experiencing,” said Aude Barral, co-founder and chief communications officer at CodinGame. “For instance, the shift away from on-site operations is reflected in the ranking of systems engineers and the prioritization of DevOps and other roles that support the virtualization of the enterprise. Also interesting is the status of C-level engineering talent. To me, it shows that hiring organizations are retaining current senior personnel and not making strategic changes until the market stabilizes,” Barral said.
Not surprisingly, HR professionals plan to focus heavily on candidate experience, talent retention and employer branding. According to the survey, HR professionals will be working on new areas of team building, events aimed at recruiting and on developing new recruitment processes. These include 80% of HR professionals planning to recruit developers with non-academic backgrounds and 48% of companies offering developers the possibility to work 100% remotely.
Average salaries for developers varied widely, according to the survey. While front-end developers, at $34,946, were paid the least, software architects, at $74,585, were paid the highest salaries.
“We’ve also seen more tech recruiters hiring developers who haven’t followed the traditional academic route,” Barral said. “A computer science degree is no longer a must-have if you want a career as a programmer. With the wealth of online and offline resources available to everyone, coders of all levels of technical competence can improve their programming skills, opening up job opportunities in the booming tech sector,” Barral said.
That’s good news for developers without a traditional academic background trying to break into development. Those developers who are self-taught or who attended a bootcamp or other short-term training are welcome to apply at many organizations. The survey found that while 55% do recruit developers with non-academic backgrounds (though rarely), 24% said they do so regularly. Only 20% of organizations said that they don’t even consider recruiting developers with non-academic backgrounds.
-
Survey: The State of Database DevOps
Enterprises are undergoing rapid changes. Throughout the past year, companies have been pressed to learn a diversified set of technologies and methods to remain agile in a changing economy. In this digital-first world, data plays a heightened role; in tandem, so does the delivery of data and the persistence of the database layer itself.
Applying DevOps principles and automation throughout the software life cycle is critical to maintaining a high level of efficiency. As with application development, databases are not immune to the DevOps takeover. Database DevOps is a discipline that considers the processes used to automate database changes and deployments — a field growing in mindshare as databases diversify.
Seventy percent of companies now use more than one database in their stack. Many organizations now use a blend of on-premises and cloud databases. Styles are diverging, too, as non-relational databases like NoSQL gain favor, and new open-source databases emerge to fit niche circumstances. All of this means database operators may require an increased emphasis on database DevOps to handle additional complexity.
The 2021 State of Database DevOps report, conducted by Redgate, surveyed 3,200 database professionals on the general state of their DevOps adoption. The survey also inquired about database change automation and deployment and underlying database technologies. Now, five years in, the study continues to reveal shifts in practices across industries.
Below, we’ll review the report’s main takeaways to see how companies implement database DevOps in practice.
DevOps Adoption Increases Across Projects
To meet pressing digital innovation needs, DevOps has surged in importance across all industries — 74% of organizations have adopted some form of DevOps, and 26% of respondents reported applying DevOps practices across all projects — a significant uptick from previous years. The report acknowledges a slight increase in DevOps adoption among larger company sizes.
So, which DevOps practices are companies employing the most? Well, in terms of DevOps for application development, the majority of organizations (50% or above) have adopted version control, automated builds, monitoring, automated unit tests, static code analysis and semi-automated deployments in production. Only 41% of organizations surveyed have fully automated deployments to production. These methods can be viewed as a basic benchmark for modern DevOps.
The study demonstrated that in most organizations, DevOps is a communal undertaking. More respondents reported adopting a community of practice, rather than relying on individual decision makers, to disseminate DevOps strategies and direct planning. According to the report, a community of practice is a group of people that “makes decisions, provides recommendations, or is consulted.”
Lack of Skills Tops DevOps Obstacles
The pressure is on engineers to produce to meet digital transformation demands. However, organizations experiencing a developer drought may not possess the talent to introduce DevOps practices. It’s no surprise that the common obstacle hindering DevOps adoption was a “lack of appropriate skills in the team.”
Other cultural barriers to DevOps adoption include disruption of existing workflows and a lack of alignment between teams. Interestingly, a lack of executive support was cited as the lowest hurdle to DevOps adoption, indicating universal consensus on DevOps goals. If we consider what technical barriers prevent improved software delivery and operations, 41% noted insufficient automation in release processes and 39% expressed hindrances due to legacy code.
Continuous Delivery For Databases Increases
Database DevOps appears to be growing in production use too. For the purpose of this study, Database DevOps is defined as “automating the delivery of database changes.” According to the report, 51% of respondents are already automating some parts of their database deployment process.
Though growing year after year, database DevOps is nowhere near ubiquitous. Compared to DevOps in application development, database DevOps has lower overall use. For example, only 36% are implementing automated builds. And, only 22% adopt continuous delivery (CD) for all databases. Nevertheless, this could quickly change, though, as 80% of respondents are working to implement CD for database changes or have already implemented it.
Setting up a CD process for database changes could increase overall software delivery speed. The top two drivers for adopting database automation are increasing the speed of database changes and freeing up time for other work. The third top reason, minimizing application downtime, rose in rank this year — which makes sense, as the desire to create more reliable systems is an ever-present concern.
However, to reap these rewards, organizations must overcome some significant challenges, like synchronizing application and database changes and maintaining high speeds for database automation, among other concerns.
Organizations Adopt Hybridized Database Approaches
Companies increasingly use a mix of different database technologies and styles. We also see an increase in cloud and hybrid database estates.
In terms of database styles, relational databases still make up the majority of market share — 98% of respondents have at least one relational database. However, non-relational databases, like NoSQL, are gaining popularity. Forty-seven percent of database professionals have a NoSQL database in their enterprise. Interestingly, only 2% use non-relational databases exclusively, indicating it’s a niche use case.
Enterprises are now using more databases than ever before. Seventy percent of database professionals reported having more than one database in their stack. This figure rose nearly 10% since last year. Database types are multiplying too — 45% have more than one type of database. In terms of database management systems, Microsoft SQL Server holds the most use, at an 82% usage rate. Others like MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB trail behind.
Enterprises are also increasing their use of cloud and hybrid database deployment models. Eighty percent of respondents host a cloud database, and 65% report a mix of cloud and on-premises estate.
One possible explanation for the diversified database effect is an increase in public cloud provider usage, combined with the rise of multicloud strategies. Database options are increasing as well — many free, open-source databases can cater to unique project needs.
This “polygot persistence” could also simply be a natural occurrence within large enterprises supporting many application nuances. As Martin Fowler describes, “… any decent sized enterprise will have a variety of different data storage technologies for different kinds of data.”
Quality Database Ops = Quality Software Performance
In summary, non-relational databases are gaining steam, cloud and hybrid database models are becoming more common, and large organizations are increasingly using multiple database types. The landscape is forecasted to diversify further, meaning database DevOps is stepping up to manage this complexity.
The report indicates a correlation between quality database Ops and overall software quality, noting that organizations that release more frequently typically deploy database changes in much less time. To achieve these goals, “… the next area for database DevOps is in the data engineering and analytics space,” writes Pramod Sadalage, director, data & DevOps, ThoughtWorks.
While it’s important to take a vendor-endorsed study with a grain of salt, it’s safe to say we will likely see more interest in database DevOps, especially as DevOps themes continue to permeate through the entire spectrum of software development and delivery.
For more information, you can download The State of Database DevOps report behind an email gate here.
-
Participate in the Checkmarx 2020 Survey
Checkmarx, the global leader in software security solutions for modern enterprise software development, and devopsy.kinsta.cloud are conducting a survey about the implementation of DevOps and related automation and security tools.
The purpose of the survey is to help organizations evaluate their DevOps maturity, find out what are the most used DevOps tools and the most common challenges organizations are facing with their current DevSecOps model.
The survey consists of 16 short multiple-choice questions. The results will depend on several factors including:
- The organization’s progress on their DevOps adoption journey.
- The role of the respondents in their organization and their responsibilities for DevOps transformation.
- Automation and security tooling capabilities respondents are using for DevOps and cloud-native applications.
- The respondents’ ability to overcome challenges and obstacles standing in the way to successfully implementing DevOps.
We urge everyone in the DevOps space to participate in this survey. The more data we can gather, the more we’ll find out about the adoption of DevOps and AppSec tools. We’re counting on you to make this report even more valuable. Invite your friends and colleagues to contribute to the survey, too — the more the merrier.
Click on this link to complete the survey.
We will make an announcement when the report is ready. Stay tuned!
-
Survey: Internal IT Teams Embrace ‘DevOps Inspired’ Processes
The “2020 State of Application Services” survey published today by F5 Networks suggests more IT organizations than ever are adopting some elements of DevOps principles to manage an increasingly diverse application portfolio.
Based on a global survey of 2,600 IT professionals, the report finds 63% of organizations still place primary responsibility for application services within IT operations. However, more than half the organizations surveyed said they are moving toward “DevOps-inspired” teams. In addition, 73% of respondents said their organizations are automating network operations to boost efficiency.
Lori MacVittie, principal technical evangelist for F5 Networks, said the report makes it clear many IT organizations are trying to adopt best DevOps practices gradually. They may in some cases set up dedicated DevOps teams, but the preference long-term is trending toward a more evolutionary transition, she said.
At the same time, application environments are becoming more complex at a faster rate. The survey finds three-tier web and mobile application architectures come are most common (40%), followed by client-server applications (34%), microservices/cloud-native applications (15%) and mainframe monolithic applications (11%). The survey also finds 87% of organizations are using multiple clouds, but only 27% of respondents will have more than half of their applications in the cloud by the end of 2020. It’s also worth noting less than half the applications being managed (45%) are external-facing.
In terms of application services deployed today, the most common are SSL VPN and security services such as firewall, IPS/IDS, antivirus and spam mitigation, followed by load balancing, global server load balancing and DNS and web application firewall (WAF) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection. In the next 12 months, however, software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) take the top slot at 41%, followed by DNSSEC (37%) and service mesh (37%). Botnet protection, anti-fraud and common performance optimization services fill out the top six, with 36% of organizations planning to deploy each.
MacVittie said the survey results make it clear IT organizations will find themselves having to cope with more complex IT environments for years to come, with the most intense pressure being on cybersecurity. The survey finds 71% of organizations admit to having a skills gap in security.
Overall, 62% of respondents said they are confident in their ability to protect applications in an on-premises data center. However, only 45% of respondents said the same for applications residing in public clouds.
The study also suggests there is a strong link between organizations that have embraced digital business transformation and the need to build and deploy applications faster. A total of 80% of respondents said their organizations are executing on some form of digital transformation.
However, as organizations make that transition, it is apparent IT teams are challenged by the need to be more responsive to the business, said MacVittie. The day is coming to an end when IT could operate as a utility that was managed by open and closing tickets as regimented tasks were completed. IT teams need to embrace DevOps to respond faster to rapidly changing business conditions, she said.
It’s unclear how long it may take for best DevOps practices to be absorbed across mainstream IT teams. However, the one thing that is clear is that many of the DevOps concepts associated with ruthlessly automating IT in the name of agility are finally starting to hit home.
-
Take the 2020 DevOps Institute Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Survey
Everyone is talking about upskilling but how do you know which skills are considered a must-have, nice to have and not as important these days? What are the hiring trends within the industry including the most sought after roles and plans? With the vast array of tools, technologies, process frameworks and human/soft skills, it is daunting to try to establish a meaningful enterprise upskilling program or personal upskilling strategy.
DevOps Institute published the first-ever “Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report” in 2019 based on a detailed global community survey completed by over 1600 respondents. The results were very deep and insightful. The 2019 Upskilling report provided the DevOps community with a solid benchmark on the state of DevOps skills across those categories. But once is not enough in a rapidly changing skills landscape. It’s time to do it again in order to analyze and validate the data year over year.
The 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report survey is active through December 20, 2019 and the second annual report will be published in early 2020. The new survey builds upon the 2019 report to help IT professionals understand the skills they need to become more T-shaped, by supplementing their depth of specific knowledge with a range of general knowledge. Further, it helps IT professionals understand the specific disciplines that will best fill the top of their “T.”
We are once again honored to have organizations such as CloudBees, Continuous Delivery Foundation, Urban Code and others sponsoring and supporting this important project. The second annual Upskilling report will publish in February 2020. You can read the full press release here.
Let’s never forget upskilling is a purely human endeavor. We need the help and support of enterprises, individuals, vendors, consultants and influencers. Please help DevOps Institute fulfill its mission to advance the human elements of DevOps by completing the survey and sharing the link with your friends, colleagues and community.
Your effort will also go to a much need charitable cause. We’d like to do our part to help the under-served pockets of youth around the world and to that end, we’ve identified a global charity that aligns with our vision, Teach for All. We will contribute $1 for each completed survey and we are aiming for 5,000 participants.
Teach for All tackles complex challenges facing children in disadvantaged communities as millions of children lack the education, support and opportunity they need to thrive. Teach for All is developing collective leadership to improve education and expand opportunities for all children, so they can shape a better future for themselves and the world around them.
Every donation, no matter how small, can make a huge difference and we are happy to contribute on your behalf to thank you for your participation with the 2020 Upskilling Survey.
Your participation is valued, and it helps support a great cause. Take the survey and share the link with your colleagues today!
-
Digital Transformation Survey: Help Us, Help You
The term digital transformation is probably one of the most overused, if not abused, terms in the tech/DevOps world today. Everyone is doing it, but what is it? Is it a synonym for adopting DevOps? What are its effects on you, your job and organization? What does it mean for software development and deployment? So many questions. Actually, they’re only a few minutes’ worth of questions in our new survey, Digital Transformation and Your Organization.
These surveys really help us understand where the market is, what our readers and community members are dealing with and what we can do to serve them better. You helping us by taking the survey allows us to help you—not only you, but the wider community as well. Your opinion is important and it counts. So please take a few minutes and help us. Take this survey now.You still here? OK, if our words didn’t persuade you, let me go one better: We are willing to pay you to take this survey. We will give one in every 10 people who take the survey a $50 Amazon gift card. To be eligible for the gift card, you need to enter your email address in the optional last question of the survey. Otherwise, we don’t know who to send it to. So that is another reason to take the survey.
We will make the report of the survey findings available as well, and everyone who registers will receive a copy. The survey is open to anyone, so please feel free to share the link with your colleagues.
Beyond taking the survey, I don’t want to minimize the importance of digital transformation. While for some—especially in our DevOps audience—digital transformation means DevOps transformation, that is not its only use or meaning. For many businesses, just adopting a digital footprint, using the internet as an active part of their business or adopting modern methods, software, Agile methodologies, etc., opens up unimagined new ways of business. At the end of the day, digital transformation may, in fact, be one of the biggest agents of change in our world over the last 20 years.
We’re looking forward to analyzing the responses and seeing your digital transformation experiences. Please help us help you by taking the survey.
-
Carving through the hype – take the DevOps maturity assessment
As anyone who spends time with their family over the holidays can attest, the notion of maturity is a highly subjective concept.
Whether it’s sizing up the next generation’s advancement or defaulting to time-honored inter-sibling behaviors, annual get-togethers offer tangible proof of what’s new and those things that likely won’t ever change.
In the domain of DevOps – an umbrella concept that encompasses a massive array of processes and supporting capabilities – gauging the maturity of your organization’s standing is also a highly interpretive task.
Given that “DevOps” means something different to nearly every organization, based on its unique makeup, methodologies, tools, and most importantly, business goals, attempting to measure progress against any outside model may seem an effort of limited value.
That said, as an increasing number of organizations seek to embrace DevOps, and growing recognition that well-worn stories of leading-edge “unicorns” don’t relate closely to most people’s real-world expectations, many teams are left wondering where their own efforts stand, especially in comparison to their peers.
To help acquit this pursuit, and allow organizations to scope their progress, CA recently launched the second iteration of its online DevOps Assessment.
Split into three short surveys covering core limbs of the DevOps tree – “Develop and Test”, “Release and Deploy”, and “Manage and Monitor” – this free tool offers detailed insight into how your organization’s maturity stacks up to that of other practitioners.
For instance, in the domain of development, how well do your teams fare in defining and managing requirements, and then presenting them to others in a structured manner? Related to release cycles, are your teams truly meeting business-driven expectations for more frequent application deployments, shorter lead times, and higher success rates? Or, when it comes to applications monitoring, are you able to distinguish the most critical and recurrent problems and how they truly impact business services?
These are perhaps some of the most fundamental questions that one could apply to measurement of DevOps adoption in general, but further investigation attempts to take a closer look at more finite, underlying issues.
Are your development teams accurately replicating realistic conditions from production systems to create virtual services and testing scenarios? Are your application release deployments fully automated across development, test and production environments? Can your teams monitor complete business services that link user experience, transactions and applications to infrastructure to pinpoint any root cause issues?
The best thing about the survey is that it immediately provides visibility into how your answers compare to those of previous respondents. There’s no fuzzy math or editorial interpretation (though we may highlight trends in a report at some point), merely instant validation, and the option to create a customized report card charting where your efforts stand in relation to those of your peers.
If you’re wondering precisely just how to achieve your long-term DevOps goals comparative to where you stand today, it might even be worth leveraging some of the involved questions for the purpose of evolving process and methodology.
The only remaining questions are: Do you think that you’re ahead of the curve? Are you afraid to find out just how far you’re behind the crowd? And most importantly, what do you have to lose?
Take the survey today and get a real-world fix on your overall level of DevOps maturity. Guaranteed it’s a far more informative activity than debating family and friends over whose turn it is to carve the turkey, or wash the dishes.