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.
