State of DevOps report reveals new insights

Monday, June 4, 2018

State of DevOps: Market Segmentation Report has been released by Puppet to give insights into the progress of the IT automation movement and more.

Puppet has announced the findings of the State of DevOps: Market Segmentation Report. The new report reveals insights by industry, region, department and company size, based on the 2017 State of DevOps Survey data. Over the past six years, Puppet has surveyed more than 27,000 technical professionals, making the State of DevOps Report a comprehensive and long-running study on the topic of DevOps.

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

Most organizations 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, visualization 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. The report 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 organizations.

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 Nigel Kersten, State of DevOps Report author and Puppet’s Chief Technical Strategist. “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 prevents companies from scaling automation success. 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.”