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Annually, Puppet releases the State of DevOps report sponsored by industry leaders. In 2021, they polled over 2,500 tech staff to find the answers to the major questions and collect accurate DevOps market statistics. The document stresses the “platform method for software delivery” as one of the hottest trends. It allows speeding up the development process and increasing the quality of results.
One of the major thoughts in this year’s survey is that the implementation of DevOps best practices such as automated testing and risk management makes it possible to achieve a high level of safety for software development solutions.
Striving to share our extensive experience with all things IT, we sought to compile the most extensive guide possible on DevOps facts, statistics, and trends. What is DevOps and why your IT company needs to hire DevOps team and start implementing it today – read further. Otherwise, if you’re an established IT expert, you can move to the next section, where we discuss the leading DevOps trends for 2021.
DevOps Definition, Features, and Goals
Development and operations (DevOps) is a combination of principles, approaches, and tools that aid in regularizing and speeding up the process of developing and deploying software applications. Upon successful introduction of DevOps, engineering and optimizing the product becomes notably faster and the overall cohesion of the staff members grows. In turn, reduced developed terms permit focusing more effort upon the improvement of customer service and other core business goals.
The first spike in software development efficiency happened at the beginning of the 21st century when the first set of Agile practices was established. Agile methodologies strive to streamline and speed up the software development process while making it more reliable and meaningful.
In turn, DevOps discipline is centered on the establishment of better interaction between the departments and distributing the load more evenly. For instance, developers can integrate some unit testing into their everyday routine, while sysadmins can eliminate some of the bugs discovered during deployment independently. Successful introduction of DevOps into the business processes of a company allows:
- Reducing time to market (TTM);
- Minimizing the failure rate or new productions;
- Decreasing the lead time between fixes;
- Improving frequency and reliability of deployment;
- Reducing the mean recovery time.
Top DevOps Trends to Consider in 2024
COVID-19 pandemic and the related restrictions lead to the appearance of new trends in many areas of commerce itself and applicable spheres of activity, and DevOps is no exception. After all, it is one of those disciplines that concentrate on pushing things forward and invoking innovation. Every company should be aware of the latest trends to meet customer needs. Observe the factors that shape the current state of the DevOps market.
- The spread of microservice architecture
One advantage of such services is the rapid delivery of complex software. The other two benefits include the straightforward, hassle-free testing process and reduced costs. Finally, microservices allow for scalability and flexibility. Around 15% of specialists who tried employing this architecture stated that they have experienced notable success, while 69% reported that they apply virtualized containers for microservice-based software deployment.
- Accelerated uptake of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms
AI and ML are, probably, the most discussed topics in modern technology. Among everything else, they brought about a revolution in DevOps. Adoption of these technologies helps to enhance software development and operational efficiency greatly. The specific field of artificial intelligence that affects DevOps the most is predictive analytics. AI-powered analytic routines can monitor the development process and provide timely alerts, forecast possible failures, discover causes to drops in staff efficiency, detect hardware/software/security anomalies, etc.
- Infrastructure as code and GitOps
Deployment of more or less complex software products implies the preliminary creation of an environment for its launch – hardware, operating system, baseline software, and libraries, computing cluster, network and storage infrastructure, etc. – and setting the parameters of this environment. Suppose a system administrator is tasked with preparing workplaces for several employees simultaneously. In the past, this would assume a lot of manual labor, especially in the case of varying hardware.
In contrast, DevOps’ focus on automating all the routine processes to the maximum led to the emergence of infrastructure as a code (IaC) discipline. IaC is the process of managing and providing infrastructure through coded configuration templates, which minimizes the need for physical access to equipment. With it, infrastructure can be deployed and provisioned in minutes, and scaling can be planned based on mutable workloads.
The GitOps paradigm, as further advancement of IaC, implies the transfer of the best software development practices to infrastructure projects. In this case. Git repositories become the reliable source of truth about the desired state of the system: code modules describing applications, settings, and infrastructure. The deployment process is automated using familiar CI/CD tools, which increases the speed of creation, reliability, and reproducibility of solutions.
- The steady growth of the SaaS model of software distribution
The ubiquitous distribution of cloud computing led to the appearance of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) concept. While it is nothing new already, the sphere grows steadily year by year. Gartner DevOps statistics report predicts that the SaaS market’s value will surpass $117.7 billion in 2021. How does DevOps fit into the picture? One of the most important tools in its arsenal is constant deployment (CD) and virtualized cloud environments are the best in such a case. The app versions are deployed to the cloud, which provides it with the virtualized hardware layer and can both up- and down-scale the allocated computing resources automatically.
An app deployed to the cloud is easy to access from any connected device on the Earth. Moreover, most cloud service vendors provide customers with a variety of relative DevOps engineer statistics. Finally, the SaaS model of software distribution allows customers to save costs, previously allocated to designing the on-premise infrastructure and hiring the service personnel. More and more DevOps teams opt for multiple-cloud development methods to achieve top quality of apps, cost efficiency, and enhanced adaptability.
- DevSecOps
Security and development have always functioned separately. If a piece of software does not correspond to the security requirements and laws, the responsible team can even ban the release of such an app.
In its drive to integrate the day-to-day operation of the enterprise further, DevOps brought forth another innovative discipline- DevSecOps – that seeks to add the security team into the fold. Development, operations, and security teams should work together to reach a consensus that would reduce the time between releases to a minimum while upholding all the required security and legal requirements.
- End-to-end automation
Integrating automation in all the spheres of company activity allows reducing errors and delays attributed to human factor while letting the employees concentrate on their core responsibilities.
- Chaos engineering
This recent field of study is aimed at discovering and researching points of failure in distributed systems. Born accidentally in 2008 from Netflix’s ordeal with ongoing availability deficits despite the move from on-premise to cloud hosting, chaos engineering bears an inborn contradiction between its methods and final goal. Chaos engineering relies on the introduction of complications and extreme loads to the system and its parts to test the viability of safeguarding methods and discover the problematic plots. In turn, the end goal is to eliminate the weak links and make the system as volatile as possible even in the most critical conditions, not unlike the pentesting in the security sphere.
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Contact UsThe Efficiency of the DevOps Implementation
DevOps industry statistics display the tremendous advantage of its employment despite the size of the IT company. In 2015 alone, for instance, the adoption high-performers deployed their apps 30 times more regularly with up to 200 times shorter lead terms. These organizations had sixty times fewer failures and restored 168 times quicker.
Those are some of the DevOps benefits statistics that would make any company striving to succeed want to implement this solution. It assists with easing and speeding up all software creation processes to guarantee maximum productivity.
DevOps 2017 statistics show even more reasons to implement this technology. Let us review these and other advantages of using DevOps for your IT projects in more detail.
- Overall business optimization
One of the founders of the DevOps community, Patrick Debois, admits that the greatest business benefit of this movement is the insight that it offers. DevOps makes companies optimize the entire systems they operate upon. It allows organizations to become more adaptive and data-driven for better alignment with clients and business goals.
- Enhanced performance
DevOps techniques allow the company’s staff to be more organized and communicate more effectively. In particular, it results in:
- Three times lower amount of moderate failures (according to DevOps failure statistics);
- Fifty percent fewer time-solving issues with security;
- Twenty-two percent less experience and skills spent on useless jobs;
- Twenty-four times faster recovery after critical failures.
- Better hiring prospects
The knowledge and implementation of DevOps in modern IT are essential for hiring efficient managers and employees. According to DevOps 2017 statistics, even 4 years back, 60% of employers in IT were searching to fill DevOps engineer positions. Since then, the demand only grew more urgent. Our team can tell it from our personal experience in DevOps. Our experts are highly valued in the market thanks to their exceptional skills and rich portfolio.
Anyway, other DevOps job statistics show that workers in high-performing DevOps-outfitted companies were more than two times more inclined to recommend their workplaces as the best places to work.
Issues That You May Face without Implementing DevOps Best Practices
What if the company does not adopt DevOps or does it incorrectly? Well, it might face certain difficulties. As Gartner fairly admits, 75% of DevOps initiatives through 2020 have failed to meet their objectives because of problems around learning and changes. Learn more about how accurate DevOps statistics with and without DevOps are. What are the key factors that make DevOps adoption vital for enterprises in the current IT market?
- High competitiveness
The success of a digital company today depends on how well and fast it can adapt to the recent methodologies and innovations. Without DevOps involved, you will not necessarily fail. Still, your competitors can implement such solutions to be ahead of you.
- The high price of careless mistakes
Have you ever heard about the $440 million software error at Knight Capital? A broken deployment resulted in a catastrophe in less than an hour. Such DevOps adoption statistics are the best proof that refusing to employ modern technologies that reduce such risks may spell the end even for an international corporation.
Another example is Amazon’s massive AWS outage caused by human factor. By accident, the local worker switched down plenty of servers and a great share of the supporting infrastructure. Moreover, it took Amazon more than four hours to fix this issue. According to the Business Insider report, many of the S&P 500 list’s organizations lost over $150 million because of that single blackout.
These cases prove how beneficial it is to adopt relevant practices and methodologies. It’s necessary to realize how to attain DevOps maturity and how to implement new solutions wisely across all departments that work on new software development. Next, we are going to discuss one of the most important tools in DevOps’ arsenal – containerized apps.
Why Are DevOps Containerization Statistics Facts Important?
Suppose you want to deploy an application into an ideal and efficient environment. Typically, the parameters of such an environment depend on the server racks, network variables, and other technical characteristics of the external infrastructure. This means that most of the time you will need to employ virtualization to reach the goal of maximum performance. The virtual environment completely rids the application from hardware dependencies and allows achieving the top efficiency.
The current peak of virtualization technology development is containerization. While traditional virtual machines provide virtualization of the computing infrastructure, containers provide virtualization of software applications. A containerization is a form of “lightweight” virtualization at the operating system level that allows packaging an application and all the software dependencies it requires into an isolated file, a “container”.
Container encloses all the components necessary to run the application, does not depend on the architecture of the host system, and interacts with the OS using standard interfaces. Moreover, in cloud environments, it can be deployed in droves to orchestrate a distribution of workload. The last task is conducted by specialized software – container orchestrators, among which Docker and Kubernetes are the most popular.
Based on the IBM study on the Docker DevOps containerization statistics trends and state of adoption across various fields, 59% of responders stated that containerization improved app quality and decreased issues, while 57% noted minimized downtimes and costs.
The usage of DevOps instruments in a company requires confidence in the integrity of the service. Extra support is required by those who look to leverage innovative tech like artificial intelligence, resilient scalable architectures that could handle massive loads, etc.
Why Do Some Organizations Fail in DevOps Implementation?
Why do some organizations fail when they try introducing DevOps techniques? Check out the list of the top things to avoid and/or consider.
- Silos
One of the primary objectives of DevOps is to break down communication limitations between separate departments. A silo is a department or other group of employees that work on their own without interacting with other parts of the company.
If operations are divided between various members who have their individual targets, delivery and integration become rather complicated. In case the staff objectives are completely different, it is impossible to achieve effective, productive cooperation that would benefit the overall enterprise goals the most. That is why companies have to teach their staff about DevOps. The idea is to educate each member on Agile approaches and DevOps procedures consistently.
- Failure to employ the correct tools
Some examples of such instruments involve Docker, Kubernetes, and Git. One should dig deeper into the DevOps usage statistics to understand why they need these tools, as well as how to work with them effectively. The mentioned above are cloud-based instruments that support the DevOps methods well, assisting with effective internal communication, safety, and automated processes.
- Failure to apply modifications to the habitual everyday processes
Are your staff ready for modifications? They should be aware of the novelties. Moreover, they have to be properly trained or, at least, consulted on the new devices or technologies. Otherwise, any novel will fail.
It’s critical to fully understand and communicate customer value. Mind that some implementations of DevOps require certain cultural transformations. Do not forget that! It’s necessary to make the transition across the departments. Explain why certain changes are required for your staff and get them prepared. Demonstrate the true value of the upcoming modifications.
- Reliance on manually controlled processes
Doing everything by hand is unacceptable in modern business. It is all about automation. Organizations should not be scared of relinquishing control to tech. The Second Watch states that 78% of companies possess separate departments that manage operations and development. Thirty percent are applying manual procedures for code deployment and control; 38% go to infrastructure management.
This kind of operation is wrong in many aspects. To benefit, the companies should instill a deep level of trust in the instruments that they have added to their processes. Automation is the primary solution nowadays. It decreases costs, terms, and is prone to mistakes.
- Micromanagement
Today, micromanagement has turned into a festering aspect for those who practice DevOps. It is a bad idea for management to scrutinize every smallest aspect closely. In such cases, the employees feel stifled and start losing any motivation for creativity.
Thus, it is all about freedom and independence. Let the developers decide what fits best for various projects. They should be able to examine instruments that they wish to try and come up with original approaches to solving different problems. Autonomy matters today.
Conclusion
DevOps adoption is spreading quickly and steadily. This claim is strongly supported by growth statistics DevOps to see how significant its best practices are nowadays. The main trends include microservice-based architectures, investments in app-driven innovations, and highly automated software development and operations. Without implementing the best DevOps practices, it would be difficult for a modern IT company to provide effortless communication and optimize all business processes.
Thus, they have to implement new solutions ASAP, without forgetting to continuously acknowledge and train their staff.
I am an IT professional with over 10 years of experience. My career trajectory is closely tied to strategic business development, sales expansion, and the structuring of marketing strategies.
Throughout my journey, I have successfully executed and applied numerous strategic approaches that have driven business growth and fortified competitive positions. An integral part of my experience lies in effective business process management, which, in turn, facilitated the adept coordination of cross-functional teams and the attainment of remarkable outcomes.
I take pride in my contributions to the IT sector’s advancement and look forward to exchanging experiences and ideas with professionals who share my passion for innovation and success.