Deep dive into DevOps

This new market segmentation report findings reveals how companies across industries and regions are progressing on their DevOps journey. Among the findings:

• Most organisations start their DevOps journeys by addressing their most acute pain points.

Deployment automation, version control, continuous integration and infrastructure automation were the most common starting points for the DevOps journey. Least common starting points were lean practices, such as working in small batches to allow single piece flow, visualisation of key quality and productivity metrics, and setting limits on work in progress.

• The larger the company size, the higher the proportion of low IT performers.

We found that there’s little difference in the proportion of high IT performers between companies of various sizes. However, as the company size grows, the proportion of low IT performers also increases.

• Automation is not as pervasive as you think.

The majority of our respondents reported high levels of manual work across configuration management, deployment, testing and change approval processes. As they adopt DevOps practices, automation is a key enabler along the journey, though it remains inconsistent and spotty across their organisations.

• Industry matters.

While all industries have about the same proportion of high IT performers, the proportion of low IT performers by industry varies greatly. The media and entertainment and retail industry have the lowest percentage of low IT performers, while financial services, insurance and manufacturing companies had the highest proportion of low performers.

“Today, every company around the world has the same priority - automation at scale - and they’re achieving this through DevOps,” said Alanna Brown, the original State of DevOps Report author and Puppet’s director of product marketing. “While the data shows that companies of all types and sizes are making progress, we still have a long way to go to eliminate manual work that slows down the business. More importantly, the State of DevOps body of research underpins that every business has the potential to become a top performer and we’re excited to help on that journey to pervasive automation.”