State of DevOps in 2018

DevOps Research and Assessment announced it has launched their latest report “Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018: Strategies for a New Economy” in collaboration with Google Cloud. Nearly 1,900 technical professionals worldwide participated in this year’s study, contributing to research findings that drive excellence in the industry and allow organizations to generate powerful business outcomes by leveraging technology.

“Our research provides compelling evidence that smart investments in technology, process, and culture drive profit, quality, and customer outcomes that are important for organizations to stay competitive and relevant - both today and as we look to the future,” said Dr. Nicole Forsgren, co-founder, and CEO of DORA. “A stunning finding in the data this year is the compelling case of doing cloud right. Adopting essential cloud characteristics drives high performance and differentiates the highest performers from those who may say they are in the cloud but are unable to realize performance gains because their technology and processes aren’t executed correctly.”

“Our goal at Google Cloud is to take the best practices from what we’ve learned running multiple billion-user products, and make that information broadly accessible to teams everywhere,” said Melody Meckfessel, VP of engineering at Google. “By collaborating with DORA on this report, we’re furthering that goal by giving the developer and operator communities new insights into the current state of the industry. These insights can help teams understand and apply best practices of high performers, such as how to increase agility and efficiency without sacrificing security or stability.”

Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018 topics include:

• Software delivery and availability unlocks competitive advantages. Those include increased profitability, productivity, market share, customer satisfaction, and the ability to achieve organization goals.
   
• How you implement cloud infrastructure matters. The cloud improves software delivery performance but teams that leverage all of cloud computing’s essential characteristics are 23 times more likely to be high performers.
   
• Open source software improves performance. Open source software is 1.75 times more likely to be extensively used by the highest performers, who are also 1.5 times more likely to expand open source usage in the future.
   
• Outsourcing by function is rarely adopted by elite performers and hurts performance. While outsourcing can save money and provide a flexible labor pool, low-performing teams are almost 4 times as likely to outsource whole functions such as testing or operations than their highest-performing counterparts.
   
• Key technical practices drive high performance. These include monitoring and observability, continuous testing, database change management, and integrating security earlier in the software development process.
   
• Industry doesn’t matter when it comes to achieving high performance for software delivery. We find high performers in both non-regulated and highly regulated industries alike.