WEEK IN REVIEW: A Wellness Check-In for DevOps
I celebrated a milestone birthday last week (I turned 39 — again —thanks for asking) and as most people do when they mark another trip around the sun, I reflected on my overall condition — health, happiness, all the things. Feelin’ alright, for the most part. But the most popular story on our site last week revealed something that’s not doing so well. Namely, DevOps.
Earlier this spring, the Continuous Delivery Foundation and SlashData released their latest report on the state of CI/CD and found that DevOps – which aims to make it easier for developers and system admins to deliver, deploy and change software faster — is not working as intended for most organizations.
The researchers surveyed tens of thousands of devs. “A mere 14% can get code into production in a single day,” wrote our reporter, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. “That’s about the same as we saw when SlashData started asking this question in the third quarter of 2020. As for deploying code multiple times per day, it’s actually shrunk to 9%, from 11% in 2020.”
Furthermore, 41% of users report taking more than a week to restore service, Steven wrote, up from the 34% who said the same in 2020. And only 11% of DevOps users said they could restore service in under an hour, a similar finding to previous years.
The report’s authors speculated that one problem might be that organizations that use DevOps tools and practices have taken on more complex projects than they may have done otherwise, potentially wiping out any productivity gains they might have made.
The data also showed that using more CI/CD tools doesn’t help matters, perhaps because of interoperability challenges. The tool standardization promised by platform engineering — the fabled “golden path” of an internal developer platform and portal — is one way organizations have been battling DevOps’ downsides to improving productivity.
We’re in the lull between conference seasons, a time when new data about how IT teams work and what tools they’re using floods the zone. Sometimes it takes a while to catch up on all the new intel (as in the case of the CD Foundation report). It’s a good idea, though, to take a pause and reflect on this report and others TNS will tell you about in the near future, to help you and your organization excel.
— Heather Joslyn, editor-in-chief, TNS
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