DEVOPSdigest

The top barriers to DevOps adoption involve stagnant organizational cultures (according to 22 percent of respondents); managing the jumble of legacy processes, IT infrastructure and newly created cloud environments (21 percent); and growing software complexity that impacts application modernization initiatives (20 percent), according to the Cloud and DevOps Survey conducted by Quali.

Other critical concerns include the lack of standardized mechanisms for continuous testing (13 percent); managing the setup, tear-down and automation during different stages of the DevOps lifecycle (13 percent); and lack of dedicated budgets for these projects (9 percent).

DevOps teams are still highly dependent on IT assistance to help deliver infrastructure, often through a ticket-based process. About 27 percent of those surveyed get access to the necessary infrastructure and environments within one day. But nearly 50 percent must wait up to one month for infrastructure access, while 24 percent wait for more than a month, particularly those with distributed teams.

Two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) reported implementing some forms of automation to improve productivity and agility, while one-third (33 percent) had no structured automation systems in place. Of those already using automation, 33 percent have self-service capabilities for their R&D and dev/test initiatives.

Interest is growing for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment, but CI/CD is still not yet a mainstream activity. More than one-third of respondents (38 percent) have adopted some Continuous Integration, while 24 percent have adopted Continuous Deployment. A similar number of respondents (27 percent) have adopted Continuous Testing processes.

More than two-thirds of survey respondents (68 percent) cited a strong need to budget for a dedicated Cloud and DevOps Competence center of excellence (CoE) lab, either on-premise or in the cloud, to handle cloud migrations, application modernization efforts, and DevOps automation use cases. Just less than one-third (32 percent) have not budgeted funds for an R&D competency center as part of their immediate plans.

Businesses were roughly split on the need for self-service capabilities to build DevOps environments, perform cloud migrations and conduct continuous testing. One-third of respondents already had some self-service access set up with cloud management platforms. One-third were strongly inclined to adopt on-demand, self-service automation platforms to improve productivity and agility, while one-third had no immediate plans to do so.