The term “DevOps” is typically used as a catch-all phrase to describe a cultural shift within organisations that closes the gap between software development and IT operations teams, which historically functioned independently. In essence, DevOps is a set of tools and practices that seek to automate and streamline the software development and release process. But who exactly are the DevOps practitioners within the global developer ecosystem and what activities are they involved in? Are there specific roles or software sectors that are particularly associated with the DevOps culture?
To answer the above questions, we asked developers in our latest Developer Economics survey whether they are involved in any of the activities that commonly fall under the DevOps spectrum, ranging from continuous integration and deployment to application and infrastructure monitoring. For the purposes of this chapter, we only consider developers who are professionals in at least one of the software areas they are active in.
The first thing to note is that the adoption of DevOps practices is widespread among professionals, perhaps even more so than one might expect, given that the DevOps movement is relatively new. According to our data, the vast majority of professional developers (82%) are involved in DevOps in one way or another. For perspective, just over half (52%) of non-professionals are involved in any of the DevOps activities on our list.
The vast majority of professional developers are involved in DevOps, but do not necessarily consider themselves DevOps practitioners
On a separate view of engagement with DevOps in our survey, only one in five developers reported working on DevOps when they were explicitly asked about their involvement in several emerging areas, including blockchain applications and quantum computing, among others. Even if we include those who said that they are learning about or are interested in DevOps, no more than 65% consider themselves to be engaged with the area. This signals that there is a large portion of the developer population that have already adopted DevOps practices but do not necessarily self-identify with the term.
Focussing on the individual steps of the DevOps lifecycle, we find that developers are first and foremost involved in the fundamental activity of releasing frequent but small software updates. The most popular development process related to DevOps is continuous integration (CI), practiced by 40% of respondents. Another 37% use continuous delivery or deployment (CD), which expands upon CI by automatically deploying all code changes to staging or production environments.
However, full automation of the software release process — and therefore true commitment to the DevOps culture — is far from a reality. While more than half (52%) of developers use CI or CD to streamline parts of their workflow, only 25% use both practices to automate all steps between integrating code changes into a central repository through to production deployment. As it turns out, developers are still sceptical about fully automated CI/CD pipelines. This is evident by the fact that nearly 40% of them manually give the green light for code deployments to be promoted to production.
Application and infrastructure monitoring, performed by 39% of developers, is one of the most common development practices, but not so much infrastructure provisioning and management (27%), which is still the realm of IT managers and system administrators. Similarly, creating automated tests (25%) and building CI/CD pipelines (23%) are rather specialised tasks, carried out predominantly by quality assurance professionals and solution architects, respectively.
You can see all highlights from the DevOps chapter on the State of the Developer Nation free report.
Interested in more than DevOps? The new State of the Developer Nation offers free insights on:
- Developers’ extra needs due to COVID-19
- Programming language communities — an update
- Why do developers adopt or reject cloud technologies?
- Who is into DevOps?
- What do developers value in open source?
- Emerging Technologies
