devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: survey

  • Survey Finds CI/CD Adoption Has Long Way to Go

    Survey Finds CI/CD Adoption Has Long Way to Go

    At the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 conference, Codefresh published the results of a survey of 130 developers that finds not only are nearly a third (32%) not using any type of continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform at all, but 60% said their organization has yet to take full advantage of automation to accelerate application development and deployment.

    In fact, according to the survey, it takes more than two weeks for two-thirds of developers (64%) to push a commit into a production environment. Additionally, the survey finds that for 39% of respondents, less than 10% of their company’s processes are automated from Git commit to code to production.

    Not surprisingly, only 19% of developers said they deploy code at least once daily. Roughly a third said they release code into a production environment only once a quarter. At that rate, it may be difficult for those organizations to justify investments in a CI/CD platform.

    Dan Garfield, chief technology evangelist for Codefresh, which develops a CI/CD platform, said that while much progress still need to be made in terms of spurring adoption of CI/CD platforms and best DevOps practices, the shift toward microservices-based applications inevitably will force the issue. The inherent complexity associated with building and maintaining applications consisting of hundreds of microservices based on containers, which regularly are ripped and replaced, will require all development teams to adopt a CI/CD platform. Right now, however, the shift to microservices is even less nascent than DevOps—21% of survey respondents said they are not employing cloud-native architectures because they are overwhelmed by the prospect.

    Garfield said once organizations more aggressively embrace microservices to increase the rate at which applications are developed and deployed, Codefresh is betting most will opt to standardize on a CI/CD platform based on Kubernetes. Most organizations have come to realize they will be building and deploying applications across multiple clouds. A CI/CD platform based on Kubernetes, such as the one offered by Codefresh, enables organizations to consistently apply the same set of best DevOps practices, he said Garfield. As such, competition among vendors that provide CI/CD platforms based on Kubernetes is sure to be fierce in the months ahead.

    In the meantime, a 10-year effort to convince organizations to employ best DevOps practices more broadly appears finally to be on the cusp of becoming mainstream. Organizations of all sizes have embraced DevOps unevenly. In fact, while most organizations have been able to achieve continuous integration with a handful of development teams, very few organizations are anywhere near close to achieving continuous delivery of application code within a production environment.

    The shift to modern applications based on containers, however, will require most organizations to standardize on a set of best practices across the enterprise. Pressure to deliver applications faster in the age of digital business transformation is mounting with each passing day. The only unknown at this point is to what degree will organizations be able to automate those processes.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Survey Finds Wide Gap Between DevOps Adoption and Success

    Survey Finds Wide Gap Between DevOps Adoption and Success

    A recent HBR survey shows there is work to be done to advance DevOps in organizations

    A survey of 654 subscribers to the Harvard Business Review found that while 86 percent of respondents said it is important for their organizations to be able to build and deploy software quickly, only 10 percent said they are successful at it.

    Conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services on behalf of Google, the survey found nearly half (48 percent) of respondents said their organization always relies on DevOps methodologies when deploying software, while another 21 percent rely on DevOps selectively. An additional 8 percent said their organization plans to adopt DevOps practices.

    Among those respondents employing DevOps practices, the top benefits cited were increased speed to market (70 percent), productivity (67 percent), customer relevance (67 percent), innovation (66 percent) and product/service quality (64 percent). Despite those benefits, however, most organizations still have a significant amount of work to do in terms of implementing best DevOps practices—the three biggest hurdles organizations face are organizational silos (50 percent), legacy technologies (49 percent) and resistance to change (46 percent).

    Melody Meckfessel, vice president of engineering for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), said these issues are precisely why Google is sharing how it operates in the form of site reliability engineering (SRE) principles, which are a prescriptive set of guidelines for implementing best DevOps practices. Not every organization needs to implement those principles to the same level, but just about every organization can benefit from adopting a set of well-defined engineering principles, said Meckfessel.

    The challenge many organizations face is the fact that most of the IT staff are not engineers by trade. Most IT staffs are made up of administrators who tend to have limited programming skills. But Meckfessel said even IT organizations that don’t necessarily have a lot of engineering expertise still can benefit from automating operations based on the SRE principles.

    Many of those organizations will need to slow down the rate at which they are building applications today to be able to speed up tomorrow. It takes time for organizations to master the cultural change required to implement DevOps practices. But once they begin to master DevOps, the benefits to the organization compound quickly. Meckfessel said two of the most important attributes of DevOps is adopting an immersive approach to training and establishing a no-blame culture within the IT organization when it comes time to conduct post-mortems. That latter goal is especially difficult to achieve sometimes, because most interactions between developers and IT operations teams historically have been less than positive.

    Meckfessel also noted it’s critical now for organizations to incorporate cybersecurity into its DevOps processes as well, which requires not only additional training for developers but also closer alignment with cybersecurity teams.

    It’s now only a matter of time before the complexity associated with emerging technologies such as microservices based on containers force many organizations to dive deeper in DevOps. The real challenge now is charting a path of least resistance that also generates the maximum level of benefit for all concerned.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Help a Student Out and Advance DevOps in Academia

    Help a Student Out and Advance DevOps in Academia

    Those of us who attended university know the pressures students face every day. Between attending classes, completing homework, figuring out what they really want to do with their life and all of the other assorted adulting they have to manage, college students have a lot going on. That’s why a little help can go a long way.

    Take Gabriel Cogo, for example. He’s a Ph.D. student at Texas Tech University in the Management Information Systems Department. He is working on his dissertation, the topic of which is DevOps, mostly focusing on the organizational impact and the factors that lead to successful DevOps adoption by organizations. He needs to gather information from DevOps professionals, such as IT analysts and managers, and reached out to devopsy.kinsta.cloud to see if we could help spread the word.

    From Cogo’s letter:

    … DevOps is an important topic, but so far not very much research has been done to help us understand how it works in actual companies.

    We ask that you participate by completing this survey. Additionally, if possible, I ask that you forward this survey to other colleagues in the IT department, preferably from different levels in the company (e.g., analyst, manager, CIO).

    This is an online survey that can be taken on your computer or smartphone, and we anticipate that it will take no more than 20-30 minutes to complete.

    This survey is completely anonymous, and we will only ask for the optional name of the company, so we can better understand the characteristics of our sample. To participate in this research please click the link:

    http://ttu.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3z5Oh7ApF1za1pz

    You are free to leave at any time. We greatly value your participation in this study.

    For those interested, Cogo has shared with us the executive summary of his dissertation, which is available here.

    So whaddya say, want to help a student out?

    — Charlene O’Hanlon

  • SolarWinds Survey Surfaces DevOps Disconnects

    SolarWinds Survey Surfaces DevOps Disconnects

    A survey of 336 developers, web product managers and DevOps practitioners published by SolarWinds, a provider of IT management tools, finds they spend most of their time troubleshooting applications—so much so that there is little time for strategic projects such as transitioning to DevOps practices.

    Joe Kim, executive vice president and global chief technology officer for SolarWinds, said that while senior IT leaders continue to preach about the critical role DevOps will play in changing their IT culture, IT staff still spends too much time dealing with tactical problems to implement any of the goals defined within a longer-term strategic plan. More than half of respondents (53 percent) said troubleshooting application issues is the top task completed on a given day.

    Because most of their time is spent on troubleshooting applications and not on managing and/or deploying applications, Kim said, many employees suffer from low morale. Then, before many IT leaders realize it, their best people are being lured away by the promise of working for an organization that enables them to focus more on the parts of IT process they enjoy, he said.

    In fact, Kim noted, in this situation IT leaders that embrace DevOps are in danger of losing credibility. If IT leaders tout the benefits of DevOps, and yet the internal IT staff is spending most of their time on application troubleshooting, chances are good many of the rank-and-file IT professionals will conclude their leaders are out of touch with their everyday reality. IT leaders would be well-advised to engage more with their IT staffs to make sure their strategies are more informed by that IT reality, he advised.

    The survey also finds respondents are spending less than 25 percent of their time proactively optimizing performance of their IT environments. Being able to spend more time on this aspect of IT is critical, because if more time is spent on proactively discovering issues, less time must be spent on troubleshooting, said Kim.

    IT teams should also be trying to push the boundaries of IT automation to reduce as much of the manual drudgery associated with IT as possible, added Kim.

    To get a better appreciation for real state of the IT environment, Kim advised IT leaders gather and share metrics with their teams. Not only does that provide IT teams with some sense of accomplishment as specific goals are achieved, the metrics make it easier to get IT teams to rally behind transitioning to DevOps best practices, he said. That’s crucial because any transition to DevOps is likely to fail because of cultural rather than technical challenges.

    It’s unlikely the need to troubleshoot applications ever will go away entirely. The developers that create those applications, after all, are only human. But it is possible to make working in IT a lot more fun and rewarding than what most IT professionals currently experience today.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Challenges and Version Control: What the Survey Results Tell Us

    DevOps Challenges and Version Control: What the Survey Results Tell Us

    Putting DevOps into practice is an ongoing experiment for many organizations. Developers often struggle with continuous integration (CI) or continuous delivery (CD) performance, testing delays and other bottlenecks. While not the answer to everything, version control—that long-established foundation of software development toolchains—has become a central part of DevOps, particularly DevOps at scale.

    This is underlined by the results of “DevOps Challenges and Version Control,” a recent survey conducted by devopsy.kinsta.cloud on behalf of Perforce Software, which provides some interesting insight into their experiences. This includes the role of version control systems within DevOps in practice, plus the top challenges the companies surveyed face.

    A total of 467 people from organizations across the globe responded, with roles ranging from DevOps engineer to QA analyst and CTO. Before we look at the challenges and issues they face—not just with their version control system but DevOps in general—first let’s look at the good news: Most version control systems are a good fit for their current DevOps initiatives.

    For instance, more than half of all respondents said the most important features of their current version control system are:

    • Improved collaboration.
    • Improved CI.
    • Better support for distributed teams.
    • Quality.
    • Faster commits.

    These were followed by compliance/security, at 48 percent. These jibe well with the main DevOps challenges they also cited:

    • CI/CD issues (a third cite CI/CD workflow streamlining as their top priority).
    • Prioritizing backlog and development projects.
    • Managing build artifacts and containers
    • Developer complaints about slow commits and merges
    • Working with open source software.

    These are all things that VCS can help fix.  For instance, these days, most version control systems transactions are automation for CI, rather than user requests.

    CI Challenges

    So far so good, but users want more from their version control system. Almost a third would like better integration with the software development toolchain. Other improvements on the wish list include security with fine-grained permissions, handling large files or repos and file access for teams in multiple locations or working remotely and improved CI performance.

    CI is critical to good DevOps and giving developers real-time feedback theoretically improves quality, but if the version control system’s speed and performance does not match demand, then bottlenecks are created. The last thing anyone wants is developers sitting around waiting for builds to happen. The survey’s respondents said testing (28 percent) and waiting for code reviews (23 percent) were the two points in CI that slow everything down the most.

    People Want More from their Version Control Systems

    So, what’s the answer? Version control that combines speed and performance, of course, but also built-in automated code review to alleviate the frustration of time spent waiting for tests and other tasks. Given that 64 percent are based in multinational locations, 7 percent work remotely and a mere 29 percent work in the same office, clearly the version control system needs to support dispersed working environments, too. In many situations where the version control system is being used for multiple artifact types and not just code, this needs to be covered, too.

    Likewise, most respondents have Git somewhere in the organization and understandably so: it is open source, users can get started with Git quickly and it is suited to small teams. However, Git struggles to scale, and, given some of the challenges that respondents quoted, this is clearly something many are experiencing. Enterprise strategies are emerging that give developers the Git interface they’re familiar with, but also the scalability, global replication and high performance for moving files and performing builds.

    With so many perceived challenges cited, it is no surprise that almost half of all those surveyed said they plan to replace their existing version control system. The top reasons cited were scalability issues, poor cross-platform integration and lack of DevOps support, plus the perennial pain point of license costs.

    Understandably, switching version control systems can seem daunting, but equally, based on the survey’s responses, many organizations are clearly living with systems that are expensive to maintain and have productivity issues that are getting in the way of, rather than supporting, DevOps. Conversely, choosing version control system strategies and tools can tangibly and positively impact on achieving DevOps success.

    — Tim Russell

  • Survey Sees Need for More Consistent Approaches to DevOps

    Survey Sees Need for More Consistent Approaches to DevOps

    DevOps is arguably one of the most disruptive forces driving transformation of IT processes in recent memory. But a new survey finds that while IT organizations are making progress, adoption of DevOps processes remains uneven at best.

    A survey of 2,419 IT professionals conducted by OverOps, a provider of code analysis tools, finds that 82 percent of organizations have partially adopted DevOps practices, while only 17 percent of respondents claim to have fully adopted DevOps. Obviously, not every workload requires an organization to embrace DevOps processes to manage it.

    But OverOps CTO Tal Weiss said the survey shows that as organizations increase the rate at which application workloads are being deployed, a fair amount of chaos is starting to reign. According to the results, more than 90 percent of companies deploy code at least once a month, and more than 60 percent release code at least once every two weeks. Nearly 40 percent, however, indicate that moving too quickly is a primary reason errors make it into production.

    Worse yet, more than 50 percent say they rely on customers to tell them about errors in production, even though 60 percent of respondents say they use automated tooling for error notification and to ensure application quality.

    Not surprisingly, IT teams are still spending an inordinate amount of time troubleshooting their environments. More than a quarter of respondents say they still spend at least roughly one full workday per week troubleshooting errors. Another 42 percent of respondents spend 10 percent to 20 percent of their time troubleshooting.

    The good news is that IT is increasingly being viewed as a team sport. A full 67 percent of respondents believe their entire team is to blame when an application breaks or has an error, and 73 percent said both developers and operations are equally accountable for ensuring the overall quality of an application.

    Weiss said more organizations need to implement a more structured approach to DevOps based around the same continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform. Too many organizations today are adopting DevOps processes from the bottom up when it’s become clear that top-down initiatives for driving consistent adoption of best DevOps practices are now required. One of the biggest challenges facing IT leaders, however, is identifying and implementing the metrics that will be employed to identify those best practices, he said.

    Change, of course, comes hard to any IT organization. It may take IT organizations years after acquiring new tools to define their processes. Inertia surrounding existing waterfall and ITIL-based processes can be incredibly high. But as the amount of software that needs to be deployed and updated continues to increase, risk levels associated with deploying applications also are starting to increase. Many organizations are now essentially experimenting on their end customers. How much tolerance customers have for trial-and-error approaches to applications development and deployment remains to be seen. In the meantime, IT organizations would be well-advised to resolve to do DevOps better in 2019.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Feature Flagging Poised for Wider Adoption

    Feature Flagging Poised for Wider Adoption

    Feature flags, also known as feature toggles, provide a means for DevOps teams to test and add new capabilities to their applications without having to take the entire application offline. The downside is they generally result in more branches of applications that need to be carefully managed within the context of a DevOps process.

    A recent survey of 550 software developers and decision-makers conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Atlassian and Rollout.io, a provider of a platform for managing feature flags, suggests that IT organizations are getting more comfortable with managing feature flags.

    The survey finds 95 percent of survey respondents said their organizations have implemented, have begun implementing or plan to implement features flags. Those that have implemented feature flags said they add 30 new features on average to each application per year, compared to those that have only begun implementing (21) or plan to implement (18) them. A full 81 percent said use of feature flags will increase over the next 12 months, and 88 percent said modern software development should assume to include feature flagging.

    The primary driver for implementing feature flags are a need to reduce risk (46 percent), increase speed of development (46 percent) and increase speed of deployment (45 percent). Eighty-seven percent of respondents said enabling an on/off or “kill” switch for features also reduces the risk of application downtime for customers.

    A total of 97 percent of respondents said they are under pressure implement new application features faster, and yet 65 percent said it is difficult to accomplish that goal safely. More than 61 percent of respondents said their organization releases new versions or updates for applications once a week or more. However, 72 percent admitted they have lost customers or users due to application development errors.

    Rollout COO Ronit Belson said building out the functions required to manage feature flags doesn’t make much sense when platforms such as Rollout.io are now emerging. The survey finds nearly 90 percent of respondents who have implemented feature flags in-house would consider moving to a third-party supplier for feature flagging management software. A total of 37 percent of respondents said the cost of in-house development is higher and 32 percent said they encountered more complexity than anticipated.

    Belson added most organizations not only fail to appreciate the cost of implementing feature flagging on their own, but also the impact feature flagging has on the culture of the IT department.

    Thanks to the rise of microservices, feature flagging should become more prevalent as monolithic applications give way to a more granular approach to application development that makes it easier to isolate functionality. In fact, the ability to apply feature flagging might be considered one of the primary benefits of the agility inherent to any microservices architecture, especially it if relies on containers that can be easily ripped and replaced. The challenge organizations will face is implementing the DevOps processes required to embrace feature flagging at scale.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CloudBees: 2019 to Be Year of DevOps Metrics

    CloudBees: 2019 to Be Year of DevOps Metrics

    While DevOps has come a long way in terms of understanding and adoption, 2019 is going to be marked by a concerted effort to applying metrics to DevOps processes. Applying those metrics will not only substantiate the value of adopting DevOps, they also will provide the impetus many organizations need to close a variety of DevOps gaps that have emerged in recent years.

    For example, a recent survey of 1,076 IT professionals conducted by CloudBees, provider of the open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous development platform, suggests that while a lot of advances have been made in terms of developers embracing continuous integration, there remains a lot of work to be done before organizations fully embrace continuous development. The survey finds 67 percent of respondents say they are practicing DevOps, but only 50 percent have implemented continuous deployment.

    Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist for CloudBees, said one of the major reasons that gap exists is that getting developers to embrace continuous integration is an easier challenge than getting disparate developer and IT operations teams to jointly embrace continuous development.

    Closing that gap will require more organizations to measure precisely the benefits they are achieving by making the transition to DevOps, sometimes referred to as value stream management, said Dawson. Once those metrics are collected, he said, it should become easier to drive DevOps processes deeper into most organizations.

    The challenge, however, is that most organizations are not especially disciplined when it comes to monitoring metrics. In fact, according to the CloudBees survey, 34 percent of respondents admit they don’t gather any metrics from their DevOps pipelines.

    In the meantime, Dawson noted the rise of containers and Kubernetes soon may force more widespread adoption of DevOps, as microservices based on containers are frequently updated. Kubernetes may soon provide a common set of definitions from which developers and IT operations teams can create a unified set of processes. A full 79 percent of respondents report they are using Docker and 47 percent employ Kubernetes. Additionally, 38 percent of survey respondents are using containers in both development and test activities, compared to 33 percent using containers from development all the way through to production. CloudBees is trying to drive adoption of Jenkins X, a CI/CD platform that is based on a microservices architecture enabled by containers and Kubernetes.

    Of course, the DevOps gap is hardly limited to definitions. The CloudBees survey also exposes communications gaps that need to be bridged in 2019. For instance, according to the survey, C-level executives and developers have a generally lower opinion than IT operations teams and senior managers concerning the degrees to which DevOps practices are being adopted.

    Dawson said greater focus on DevOps metrics will go a long way to closing DevOps gaps that are becoming more apparent with each passing day. DevOps is relatively easy to subscribe to as a philosophy. It’s only when organizations begin to implement CI/CD systems in a way that can be measured objectively does the commitment to that philosophy get tested.

    — Mike Vizard

  • CollabNet VersionOne State of Agile Survey: Join the Fray

    CollabNet VersionOne State of Agile Survey: Join the Fray

    If you follow the news on Agile software development, topics such as adoption, scaling, Kanban, Scrum or certifications, it’s likely you saw statistics in your reading that were taken from the “State of Agile Report.”

    For the last 12 years, CollabNet VersionOne has been surveying the Agile software development community and providing this valuable body of research to the market. The data is widely cited in publications worldwide and used by organizations to gauge trends in the industry and help business leaders in their decision-making. Many vendor organizations also reference the report to gain insights on how to better serve customers.

    Last year, the 12th “State of Agile Report” was compiled with insights from nearly 1,500 respondents. That’s a lot! The more IT professionals who take this survey, the more useful the results will be. By gathering more survey responses, CollabNet VersionOne can provide a more accurate analysis to help guide the industry.

    The best way for us to get a big-picture view of how organizations are adopting and scaling the practice is to gain an understanding of individuals’ experiences.

    Results from Last Year

    Last year’s report told us that organizations are realizing the benefits they set out to achieve by adopting Agile. Here were some other the key insights from the report: (You can download a full copy of the report here: https://explore.versionone.com/state-of-agile).

    • Agile is expanding within the enterprise – Adoption is growing within organizations, both more broadly and deeply. A higher percentage of respondents this year report that “all or almost all” of their teams are Agile, and that the principles and practices are being adopted at higher levels in the organization.
    • There is room for improvement in maturity – Only a small percentage of respondents indicated that their organizations have a high level of competency with Agile practices across the organization. The majority acknowledge that their organizations are still maturing.
    • Organizations are scaling Agile – The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is reported as the most widely used approach for scaling. Internal coaches, consistent practices and processes across teams and the implementation of a common tool across teams are the top three factors reported to have been most helpful in scaling Agile.
    • DevOps initiatives are on the rise – The survey reveals the importance of accelerating the speed of delivery of high-quality software and the emphasis on customer satisfaction. It’s no surprise, then, that a large number of the survey respondents report that a DevOps initiative is underway or planned for the next 12 months.

    Who Should Take the Survey?

    The “State of Agile” survey is for anyone with stakes in the software development life cycle. It is not just for enthusiasts or members of teams using the practice; even if your organization is not using Agile, we still want to hear from you.

    Here are some examples of job titles that fit within the scope of this survey:

    • Business analysts
    • C-level executives
    • Development leaders
    • Software developers
    • DevOps managers
    • Consultants/trainers
    • Product managers and owners
    • Project managers
    • Scrum Masters
    • Agile coaches

    If any of these roles describe you, we welcome you to take the 13th annual “State of Agile” survey today. It will take you around five to eight minutes to complete. You can begin by clicking here. Responses will be accepted until midnight, Dec. 31.

    Thank you for your valuable input.

    — Thomas Hooker

  • The State of Web and Mobile DevSecOps

    The State of Web and Mobile DevSecOps

    As the leaders in coverage of the DevOps world, the reporters here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud are constantly pressed upon to convey the true state of DevSecOps at any given moment in time. We try to dig up the state of the union by asking important questions of IT executives, DevOps champions, security leaders and other pundits. The answers we get offer illuminating narratives of the DevSecOps journeys in global organizations across a wide range of maturity levels. But, at the end of the day, these are anecdotal at best.

    We know that nothing beats hard data, which is why we’re partnering with NowSecure to field a new survey that we hope will offer solid numbers around secure DevOps maturity and adoption practices.

    With this survey, we hope to do a couple of things: First, we obviously want to provide insight into how well organizations are automating their software delivery and application security (appsec) testing practices across their entire software portfolio. We’d like to understand the perceived benefits organizations have for folding security into DevOps and the inhibitors.

    Second, though, we want to take a deeper dive into where DevSecOps is specifically when it comes to delivering mobile applications. There’s not a lot of visibility into whether there’s a different set of standards, practices or benchmarks for mobile software, but we have a hunch there might well be a gap. We can’t be sure until we’ve got some data to show where the industry stands when it comes to mobile DevSecOps.

    Which is where our esteemed readers come into the picture.

    We’re asking executives, managers and practitioners to take our new survey and let us know how things stand in their organizations. We’re looking for respondents from a range of backgrounds—be they DevOps engineers, developers, architects, security pros, operations gurus or QA professionals. Help us out so we can provide important data back to the industry.

    — Ericka Chickowski