11% of DevOps Leaders Consider Their CI/CD Infrastructure Reliable

NORTH BETHESDA, Md. — Although 85% of DevOps leaders regularly test their infrastructure for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) in software development, 11% of them consider that infrastructure as reliable, according to a recent report.

“The Truth About DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey” reveals that while key DevOps processes and tools such as CI/CD and infrastructure as code (IaC) have made significant strides in broad adoption, “opportunities for marked improvement still exist.”

The report was released this week by North Bethesda, Maryland-based CloudBolt Software. The company is the maker of a platform for enterprise cloud management. 

For CI/CD, the report shows there are “notable gaps” in infrastructure provisioning speed, testing, and overall reliability that are hindering efforts to advance CI/CD. Developers need to deploy infrastructure “pipelines” and reliably test their apps as they are developed. 

For IaC, teams should enable non-technical teams to tap its benefits and better governance and visibility are necessary.

Report Findings

Manual processes and inconsistency plague CI/CD pipelines 

• While the goal of CI/CD is to deploy applications rapidly and continuously, survey results show that 15% deploy even once per day
• Key culprits? 63% said there are too many manual processes involved when setting up pipeline infrastructure, and 55% have difficulty creating consistent CI/CD pipeline environments

Need to put the “continuous” back in CI/CD

• To advance the CI/CD, not only do enterprises want faster access to infrastructure for their pipelines (70%), they also want the ability to continuously detect pipeline infrastructure issues (e.g., unexpected changes to compute, storage, configurations, passwords, etc.) before they happen (62%), thereby improving reliability

DevOps teams are Using IaC to gain speed and agility 

• Terraform, the open-source IaC by HashiCorp, has widespread adoption, with 88% saying they are either using it or considering using it 
• Self-service and governance are key complements for IaC: 62% of respondents recommended each of the following to complement their Terraform experience:
  • allow for non-Terraform experts to deploy infrastructure using Terraform
  • ensure only Terraform plans with “IT guardrails” are executed
  • add ability to visualize and cost-optimize infrastructure deployed by Terraform
• IaC + cloud management is a powerful combination: To meet the needs above, 74% of enterprises said they most commonly use a cloud management platform (CMP) in conjunction with Terraform to better manage their hybrid cloud environments end to end

“CI/CD, IaC, and Terraform all have tremendous potential to empower developers and IT to optimize application development and deployment and stay competitive in the new cloud order,” said Jeff Kukowski, CEO, CloudBolt Software. 

“Our latest research piece reveals what is needed to accelerate improvement and adoption in very meaningful ways.”

Report Methodology

“The Truth About DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey” is based on a global survey of 200 IT and DevOps leaders at companies with at least 1,000 employees. 

Of the respondents, 75% held titles of vice president or above. 

The survey was conducted on the research platform by Pulse, a research firm owned by Gartner.