At its cdCon 2022 conference today, the Continuous Delivery Foundation shared a State of Continuous Delivery in 2022 report that found nearly half of developers (47%) use either continuous integration or continuous deployment platforms—but only about 20% report using both to automate all application build, testing and deployment.
Overall, only a little less than a quarter (23%) of the 18,585 developers surveyed by SlashData on behalf of the CDF said they are not involved in any DevOps-related activities.
Fatih Degirmenci, general manager for the CDF, said that the relatively low percentage suggested that DevOps workflows are now more widely employed than ever. Monitoring software and infrastructure performance and using continuous integration to automatically build and test code changes remain the most popular DevOps-related activities cited in the survey, at 36% each.
The survey also found that, among large enterprises, the proportion of low performers when it comes to lead time for code changes has dropped from 34% to 24% in the last six months, while the proportion of top performers that need less than one day for code changes has also increased from 13% to 21%.
Larger enterprises are also seeing an increase in developers that report they can restore a service in less than an hour (22%) versus those that still require one week (18%), according to the report.
The survey also suggested there is a strong correlation between the adoption of modern backend technologies such as microservices, containers and Kubernetes and improved lead times for code changes and time to restore. Survey respondents using containers are twice as likely to have lead times of less than one day, while respondents that have adopted Kubernetes are one-third more likely to be top performers.
However, the survey found no impact on deployment frequency. The percentage of top performers capable of deploying code multiple times per day is 11%, the report found. Developers who don’t use these technologies are, in fact, about twice as likely to deploy multiple times per day. Overall, only 53% of developers that work in backend development are using microservices.
Degirmenci said it is clear there is still much work to be done in terms of simplifying DevOps workflows. The average number of technologies that DevOps practitioners use now stands at 4.6 in the first quarter of 2022. The CDF last month launched a CDEvents project to create a vendor-neutral specification for defining a format for sharing event data across multiple services, platforms and systems.
In the meantime, the CDF survey also noted more than a quarter of respondents (26%) now rely on managed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) services rather than building and maintaining a DevOps platform themselves.
It’s too early to say how much complexity is driving organizations to rely on managed services, but as the pace at which applications are being developed continues to increase, more organizations are starting to focus on developer productivity. As a result, more than a few organizations are reviewing their existing approach to DevOps and whether it is actually a bottleneck rather than an accelerant for building and deploying applications faster.