DEVOPSdigest

DevOps is moving into the mainstream, according to a new survey conducted by Redgate Software.

Major findings include:

■ Nearly half (47 percent) of companies surveyed have already adopted DevOps across some or all of their IT projects.

■ Adoption rates increase with company size, reaching 59 percent among companies with over 10,000 employees.

■ One-third (33 percent) of companies surveyed plan to adopt DevOps during the next two years.

■ Only a fifth of the respondents have no DevOps plans over the next two years.

■ The highest levels of adoption are in IT Services and Retail, with Finance and Healthcare not far behind.

■ Lower levels of adoption are in the Government, Education, and Non-Profit sectors, where a higher number of respondents also thought it unlikely they would adopt this new way of working within the next two years.

■ The main factor holding companies back from taking up DevOps is the lack of knowledge and skills in implementing it.

■ For those respondents with no plans to move towards a DevOps way of working, a lack of awareness of the business benefits of DevOps is cited as the main obstacle, followed by a lack of budget to spend on new tooling.

DevOps and the Database

The database brings its own challenges to DevOps, according to the survey. There are hurdles to synchronizing application and database changes, and differences between the ways application and database developers work.

While the greatest challenge to database DevOps is seen to be applying consistency across application and database development, 68 percent of those who have already adopted DevOps practices say it would take less than a year to move to a fully automated database development process.

Per the survey, however, only one fifth of respondents are applying DevOps practices like continuous delivery to their database, as well as their application.

When it comes to integrating database changes into a DevOps process, the main driver is to increase the speed of delivery of database changes. However, as to be expected, priorities vary according to the role of survey respondents.

Developers want to be freed to do more value-added work, for example, whereas database administrators are driven by a desire to reduce application downtime and improve collaboration between development and operations teams. IT directors and C-level executives are more concerned with the need to minimize the risk of losing data.

Methodology: Over 1,000 companies and organizations from around the world participated in the The State of Database DevOps Survey, over half of which employ 500 people or more. The survey included an equal split of respondents at developer level and manager level or above.