ElasticBox Releases 2015 DevOps Survey Highlighting Hype vs. Reality
Growing investments in DevOps aren't yielding anticipated ROI
LAS VEGAS, Oct. 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- AWS re:INVENT -- ElasticBox, the most agile cloud application manager, and DevOps.com today announced the results of the 2015 DevOps survey. ElasticBox and DevOps.com polled DevOps specialists, engineers, and IT managers about their level of DevOps adoption and how they measure real value versus hype. Over 300 DevOps practitioners in the US mostly in B2B or consumer-facing businesses, answered the survey. While DevOps is growing in importance in both large and small companies, most have yet to achieve the anticipated ROI.
Following is a summary of key findings:
DevOps has evolved beyond hype
The study reveals that DevOps is a recognized and dedicated function. Over 50% have DevOps titles are in such a function, and more than half said they use or dabble in DevOps practices. IT services and software verticals form the biggest group practicing DevOps whether or not they call it that.
Cross-functional collaboration is fundamental to DevOps
More than half the respondents cited DevOps as their primary job function. Aside from their main job, many also perform operations, development, and security work. More than half also interact with 10 or more people. As the study shows, both large and small enterprises have a need to collaborate and work across functions. People in development, operations, and DevOps teams increasingly communicate with larger teams. Clearly collaboration is a major driver for DevOps practitioners.
Top three DevOps initiatives: Automated build tests, CI/CD, and configuration management
To learn where high-performance IT organizations invest in DevOps, the survey also delved into which initiatives drive their DevOps adoption. Over 64% identified automated build and testing as their leading DevOps focus. Configuration management followed closely. Secondarily, 57% said they focused on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), which usually also includes automated build and tests. What's interesting is that collaboration, infrastructure as code, and cloud application management also emerge as key initiatives. DevOps is still a broad and widely used term for many sub-functions.
Expectations on DevOps investments and returns
The survey also explored budgeting across DevOps initiatives to get a sense of where enterprises spend top dollars. Expectations on returns from these DevOps investments showed interesting results. When asked what estimated ROI they had realized over the past 12 months, 50-60% of respondents couldn't identify or estimate the value. In DevOps, there is a strong propensity to use free, open-source software, with an unclear ROI. When calculating the cost of DevOps initiatives, companies often overlook hidden costs such as setup, support, and training -- the total cost of ownership.
Cloud application management, a growing trend
The survey also investigated how IT looks at cloud application management and solutions in that category. Two key points came up. DevOps practitioners have yet to see cloud application management as a category separate from configuration management and cloud provider services. One reason for that is because cloud infrastructure providers have been continuing to invest in capabilities that enable management of workloads and applications that sit further up the stack. Hence, many DevOps practitioners don't manage such tools as enterprise IT owns the core infrastructure. As an alternative, we often find that DevOps may rely on homegrown solutions in lieu of access to core IT resources and infrastructure.
"Ironically, DevOps was borne out of a need to integrate and drive collaboration across development and IT," said Carol Carpenter, CEO of ElasticBox. "However, the tools being used by DevOps have addressed parts of the delivery process driven by development, but are often not fully integrated across both IT and dev for the full end-to-end orchestration. They are still missing the glue that brings DevOps tools and processes together. This is what is driving demand for cloud and application management platforms like ElasticBox."
More detail and insights are in the Real Value of DevOps Survey report. Download it here.
Supporting Resources
- Company Blog: elasticbox.com/blog
- Twitter: @ElasticBox
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/elasticbox
ABOUT ELASTICBOX
ElasticBox enables companies to deploy any application anywhere, so businesses can innovate faster. By orchestrating the deployment of applications to private and public clouds, customers like Netflix, DeNA and Cytobank have accelerated their application lifecycles by 10x. With a reusable architecture of boxes, teams leverage ElasticBox to provision instances in one click, access a sophisticated service catalog of boxes, and execute continuous integration and continuous delivery.
Contact:
Bethany Weiss Floraday
Weiss Floraday Communications
(415) 786-9583
[email protected]
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SOURCE ElasticBox
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