A survey of 300 enterprise IT and technology leaders published this week finds that while 85% work for organizations that have completed DevOps platform migrations in the last two years, only a quarter (25%) said consolidation delivered expected value within a year.
Conducted by the market research firm TrendCandy on behalf of CloudBees, the survey finds 57% of respondents report their organizations spent more than $1 million on migrations last year, with average projects costing $1.75 million and running on average 18% over budget.
Despite that level of investment, 60% said delayed launches led to missed revenue opportunities. More challenging still, 94% said they saw slower or the same system performance. Only 21% report achieving reduced cycle times, with only 6% seeing an improvement in mean time to resolutions. Two thirds (66%) admitted they underestimate the level of disruption that was created.
Additionally, only 25% said their DevOps transformation initiatives met timeline estimates and 37% of respondents said more than a quarter of their migration budgets were wasted because of a failed or abandoned initiative.
CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur said the survey makes it clear that despite the hype being generated over DevOps modernization, there is a significant gap between ambitions and actual business and technology realities. Innovation does not equate to there being a need for a platform migration, he added.
The toll a platform migration has on productivity is also underestimated, he added. A total of 61% said migration fatigue resulted in delaying projects for six months or longer. A full 70% also saw increased developer burnout, while more than three quarters (76%) experienced a drop in developer morale.
Nearly three quarters (74%) said tool sprawl increased, with two-thirds (66%) reporting lower satisfaction after a consolidation initiative was completed.
Three quarters (75%) also said maintaining security integrations became harder after migration, and 40% discovered new blind spots that widened compliance exposure. Potentially just as troubling, 70% admit business leaders often push AI tools into pipelines without a security review, which is likely to increase the volume of technical debt that software engineering teams will need to address later.
Additionally, 92% said their organization saw greater delivery efficiency by integrating tools rather than replacing them, and 84% said real-time analytics were easier to adopt without re-platforming. A full 92% now prioritize modernization paths that avoid platform disruptions.
Those disruptions, however, are only likely to increase in age of AI coding, noted Kapur. DevOps teams are underestimating the impact additional code will have on existing pipelines but rather than replacing them the focus should be on optimizing existing DevOps workflows, he added.
DevOps teams will also soon be pressured to reduce the total cost of running applications as the total number deployed continues to increase, noted Kapur. In fact, software development is heading toward a world where the cost of creating code will soon be near zero, he added.
Each DevOps team will need to chart its own path forward. Many are adopting, for example, platform engineering, a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale. Regardless of approach, the one thing that is certain is DevOps workflows for better or worse will never be managed the same again.
