A survey of more than 300 DevOps professionals conducted by Firefly, a provider of a platform for automating cloud provisioning, found that more than a third of organizations (36%) have allocated the equivalent of two or more full-time engineers per month to writing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates.
A full 82% are also deploying the templates within the context of a DevOps pipeline, with 68% reporting more than half of their cloud instances are now managed using IaC tools, according to the survey. A total of 27% reported they are now managing every aspect of IT as code.
The challenge is that 61% of respondents also admitted they can’t automatically detect configuration drift over time, with more than a third (35%) spending days or weeks remediating IaC templates. Well over half of respondents (56%) said they are also retrofitting existing cloud instances using IaC tools.
Cindy Blake, vice president of marketing for Firefly, said this issue is likely to become more challenging to address as the number of clouds in use continues to increase. The survey found 44% of respondents already use multiple cloud providers. Overall, 42% reported having more than 10 cloud accounts.
The top IaC benefits identified by survey respondents are improved efficiency (75%), increased reliability (55%) and easier compliance (52%) and simpler troubleshooting (49%).
Not surprisingly, the survey identified knowledge (46%) followed closely by complexity (43%) as the top challenges organizations face when using code to manage cloud infrastructure. Factors increasing complexity included cost and complexity (70%), followed by security (61%).
In addition, only 14% of respondents reported that all their engineers are IaC literate. More than a third (36%) said they only have one IaC-literate engineer. As a result, many organizations are now attempting to navigate IaC bottleneck issues that could be alleviated if they relied more on automation that can be integrated within a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, noted Blake. She added that many organizations are already allocating too much engineering time to manually writing IaC templates.
Those manual efforts often result in misconfigurations that are easily exploited by cybercriminals, added Blake. Many developers using IaC tools such as Terraform have had little to no cybersecurity training, so the odds they will make a mistake are high.
At a time when more organizations are focused on the productivity of DevOps teams and ensuring the integrity of software supply chains, there is a clear need to automate processes that increasingly span multiple clouds. More organizations than ever are employing multiple clouds to ensure application availability in the wake of a series of outages over the past few years, Blake said.
Regardless of the motivation, multi-cloud computing is here to stay. Developers opt for different clouds based on the performance capabilities they can provide for various classes of workloads. There may be one cloud platform that runs the bulk of the workloads, but the number of organizations that have standardized on a single cloud are comparatively few. The issue is finding the best way to manage multiple clouds that doesn’t require as much manual effort so organizations can reduce the total cost of managing IT environments.