DevOps an emerging industry practice among CIOs

BANGALORE, INDIA: Rackspace, has announced the findings of a global Vanson Bourne study on the adoption of DevOps initiatives for Rapid Application Delivery (RAD).

The study, which was commissioned by Rackspace, found that DevOps is becoming increasingly recognized as an established industry practice and the rate of adoption is remarkable given its relative infancy. Over three quarters (77 percent) of the respondents said they were familiar with the term DevOps, with 55 percent already having implemented DevOps practices. A further 31 percent said they were planning to implement it by the end of 2017.

In addition, the poll of 700 technology decision-makers across the UK, US and Australia, showed clear business value of implementing DevOps. Over half of the companies with a DevOps programme reported seeing an increase in customer conversion and satisfaction (52 percent) as well as an improvement in customer engagement (43 percent). Strikingly, over a third (38 percent) also experienced an increase in sales.

On the technology side, of those that have deployed a DevOps programme, over half (57 percent) experienced faster delivery of new features, while 46 percent had a more stable operating environment. Increased innovation was also a benefit for 43 percent while 32 percent have reduced their IT costs.

Getting over hurdles

Despite the clear benefits of DevOps to speed up the process of application development, deployment and operations management, many businesses still need to address the cultural change DevOps introduces. Roughly a third of those who have gone down the DevOps route said internal resistance from both operations teams and developers was a challenge, while nearly a quarter (24 percent) had issues from the wider business not buying into the change. Additionally, of the 14 percent not planning to implement DevOps at all, 41 percent said they had other more urgent IT priorities.

Organizational drivers for DevOps

In the majority of the cases where DevOps had already been implemented, the Operations team was the primary driving force behind the change (43 percent). For those businesses still in the planning stages for their DevOps programmes, the operations team was again key to the process (43 percent).

Chief Information Officers were also key facilitators, with 25 percent having driven the adoption of DevOps within their organizations.

Outsource and automate

With 59 percent of respondents agreeing that DevOps is 'a software development process that brings developers and IT operations closer together', the primary DevOps practice implemented by survey respondents was to fully integrate development and operations teams (49 percent). Successful DevOps teams also aligned DevOps goals with business goals (47 percent).

Following the clear team integration and business goal setting priorities, other popular DevOps initiatives included introducing Continuous Integration (42 percent), Automated Testing (40 percent) and Application Monitoring (38 percent).

70 percent of organizations currently using DevOps also said that they are working with third parties to outsource DevOps automation services with nearly two thirds (59 percent) citing the fact that it is more cost effective for them to do so. This in turn is allowing them to focus more on their business to improve innovation (50 percent) and productivity (48 percent).

Future Implementations

For the 31 percent of the organizations which were planning to introduce DevOps, all had scheduled implementation to take place by the end of 2017. Contrary to those who have already implemented, their key priority will be to align DevOps goals with business goals (53 percent), perhaps an indication DevOps is gaining greater recognition for adding real business value.

DevOps integrates developers and operations teams in order to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, automating workflows and continuously measuring application performance.