DevOps Next 2024 and Beyond with Mitch Ashley | DevOps Experience 2024

Hi everybody, this is Mitch Ashley, I'm so glad that you took the time to stop by and hear about some special research that we've been doing as part of Textron research. Now, part of the larger Futurum group, as the techron gets acquired, this was a look at DevOps and where we are on this journey. We've been doing this for a while.

Some of us may be new, but some of us been doing this for 10 plus years, maybe even little, quite a bit longer than that as part of DevOps. com and all of our, uh, mailing lists, et cetera, and collected data from people and asking them kinda what are they doing with DevOps? Is it making an impact?

Or where do we think we're going next? So, I'm gonna be using some slides. I don't usually talk to slides, but when you're presenting data, it makes a lot easier for you to follow along and consume and things like that.

So be sure to ask any questions that you have in the chat. And if we don't get to those during the talk, I'll be happy to follow up with you. You can, you can also follow me on, uh, LinkedIn and, and see, see, contact me there and let me know if you have any questions.

So if you don't know me, I'm Mitch Ashley, I'm Chief Technology Advisor with the Futurum Group, uh, I guess about the fourth largest analyst organization focusing on DevOps and cloud and cybersecurity, ai, et cetera. I'm also the founder of techron Research, part of the Techron group, where we did this research and service, the CTO for the company. So I mentioned my specialty areas.

My background is both as a product creator, probably about two thirds of my career and about a third, uh, practitioner, you know, living the dream, if you will. So running it, running software projects that weren't for, uh, products, et cetera. And I've also done three DevOps implementations, starting back, I think as early as around 2013 or 14, and, uh, at three different companies.

So it's been, uh, quite a journey. So I'm able to share some of my experiences with that too. So, as I mentioned, we talked to a wide group of people.

So let's, let's look at where we are on this DevOps journey. You know, where we, in the adoption, the maturity of, of DevOps. If you look at the chart on the right, starting in 2014, you kind of see this nice, steady, gradual at first, but steady, uh, growth.

It's not a hockey stick. It's not a kind of flat, you know, plateau that's flattened off and decreasing. It's a nice steady growth of DevOps per year.

And this is where we asked res respondents, what year did you start practicing DevOps? So you can see we still have very significant growth happening year to year and around 10% range. It's maybe dropped a percentage or two in the last two years, but we're still in that same area.

And we also ask people, where are you on the maturity curve? Now, the, the, the, uh, nomenclature that we are used were things like getting started, right? I'm just starting to use piloting, DevOps, et cetera.

I'm operationalizing it, meaning we're applying our learnings, we're getting our feet under us. We're starting to apply this to more than one, possibly multiple projects within the same group or organization. Standardizing is, we're we're pushing this across, you know, our, our company, right?

Maybe not everybody is using it, but we've got it well enough that we think we can start doing this on us scalable basis. And, and the fourth category is mastering. We really have high competency in DevOps and, and confidence probably started a little bit earlier on that DevOps curve curve or have invested significantly in making that happen.

Now you can see a nice kind of bell curve. Most people are in that standardizing about a third in that standardizing phase, only 4% said they haven't started 5%. Uh, we don't plan to do DevOps.

So we're, we're talking to a majority of people that responded to this survey. Uh, uh, uh, who are practicing DevOps on a day-to-day basis, certainly at least on their project, if not, the most largest group is doing it on multiple projects. So what aspects, kinda looking at the software development life cycle.

DevOps can happen in many places, right? We typically start in CICD is the entry point very common for people to do that. And you can see that in the build, 79% folks saying that's where they started, uh, in 70% for the CICD portions of that.

Um, so not, not unexpected, but you can see that's the, that's the most significant, followed by test and development and, uh, releasing software and kind of bringing up the ends of the ends of the process, the lifecycle at the beginning and planning and operating and monitoring, not unexpected. So if, if you were kind of in this, in this, uh, analysis, or you saw yourself in this data, you might see something that looks very familiar. We look at what percentage of your products are applying DevOps.

We see 19% that said all of our stuff's on DevOps, DevOps, 75% of our projects on DevOps, that was a third 50%, 21%. So if you kind of roll this up and say, well, actually, if you look at 50% and above, you know, you're looking at well over 60, close to 70, 70 plus percent of folks are at least applying DevOps on half, if not more of their projects. So it, it is definitely being used and much smaller on the curve for people that are 25% and below.

Again, I said, I'm presenting a lot of data and I'm talking a lot, so I have to take a drink of water here and there. So if we look at, so we're doing, we're doing DevOps, but are we investing in DevOps, right? We can say we're doing DevOps and practice some agile scrum kind of things.

Some, some of the disciplines, but are we investing in, in DevOps in our organization? And there's a lot of different market statistics on the growth of the DevOps market and how much it will grow by 2030 or whatever metrics that is used. 5 billion by 2028.

There's others that have 2030. I think for us, when we looked at where are you investing and you'll see these four colors or five colors used on some charts coming up, significant increase in the orange or the red spectrum, yellow being modest, blue being no change, kind of staying where we are. Then you can see most very few are saying, you know, decrease or no, you know, significant de decrease.

We're not investing. Uh, so very much people are still, still on that front end of the investment curve. Um, they're not in the early part.

We're in that kind of standardizing into maturing phases, if you will. 8% is the leading areas where people are investing. Again, if you're doing DevOps, that makes sense.

Uh, that's pretty common. But we also have seen people in, uh, investing in containers and orchestration and many other things. I'm gonna show you some more details around that as well.

So this is a bit of an eye chart. Um, by the way, the report is available online. It'll give you a QR code that you can download.

com. It's free. Gotta go through a little red rich page.

You'll get some emails, yes, to attend some other webinar and event kind of things. Thank you for, for attending and, and following us. Uh, just to spotlight some other areas, we looked at a lot of dimensions and you can dig into the data that you find interesting.

The things that I look for, where did we see kind of an uptick? And, you know, some areas there was quite a bit, uh, of, um, of uptick and investment. You could see, like, for example, in the middle of the page, automating automated test suites and tools.

Uh, we're on the modest increase or one of the highest areas along with DevOps platforms. We're gonna talk about platforms in in a moment here. Also, AppSec, cold vulnerability scanning API security test, case library, uh, results analysis.

CICD, of course, automated deployment. Observability being another, you know, we, we've touched on a lot of areas. The the main point is all areas are being vote, uh, invested in.

We don't see any dropping off yet. So that tells me that we're investing across the life cycle of SDLC and how DevOps contributes to that. Now, I often use DevOps interchangeably with creating software.

So sometimes when I say DevOps, I'm not talking about a tool. I'm not talking about one method or one thing like A-C-I-C-D or a deployment. I'm talking about really how we do the things that DevOps contains.

The philosophies around continuous improvement, small elements of work automation, deploying code to production in smaller chunks, et cetera. Being able to really have mul multiple streams, workflows all happening at the same time. Whether it's a few or it's thousands.

Just depends on where you are in your organization. So let's talk about value delivered by DevOps. This I think is kind of the money shot, if you will, that uh, you know, if you want to use their presentation to your manager or sales presentation to a customer or something like that.

6% of software organizations say DevOps increases their velocity to deliver new capabilities into production. Now, why this is significant is, I, I'm not as much a big believer in how many deploys per day or per hour, whatever is what matters. It does in some scenarios.

That's important. If we need to get an emergency patch out, right? We don't want it to be on just, you know, uh, pulling teeth to figure out how to get something in production in an emergency basis.

We wanna be able to ramp up our cycle and get something out quickly. But not everybody can deploy. We're more or less consume software multiple deploys a day.

We're not all Netflix or Google or whoever. So I look at more of what, what increases our velocity, how can we get something to production more quickly on whatever basis? And then of course, the chart to the top right, upper right, faster time to market.

The colors here mean a little bit different. High, medium, low and no change. So kinda see the same thing again, right?

High end, medium, get the biggest ratings. Oftentimes they're pretty close if not the same, in that 40 to 45, 40 6% range. So the, the takeaway here to me again is, you know, people are doing DevOps now 'cause they think they're supposed to or it's the fad or whatever is that they are seeing value and and getting faster.

Time to market is certainly one. Look at that. 38 and 42%, right?

And high to medium, increase the velocity, right? 46, 40 1%. The frequency of releases is also up.

Um, I think managing complexity, which is also an area we have a lot more work to do. Uh, not quite as rated as highly there, but, um, maybe helping, maybe helping. We'll see.

Uh, this does look at the frequency of, of deployment. Just kind of breaking down that a little bit more. In our respondents we saw daily at 12% weekly, 34% monthly, 29%.

So kind of a district distribution curve between daily and quarterly, which I'm not surprised to see, right? Most of us don't deploy, uh, multiple, uh, multiple releases in the production per day. But the fact is we are doing it more more frequently.

I can remember my first project coming outta college. We didn't release code for a year. Can you believe that?

That would be heresy today. Yeah, you'd get fired if you're the project manager for that project today. Might how things have changed.

So wh which of the following does your organization practice regularly? Kinda looking at different aspects or dimensions of DevOps and we could have added 20 more things, right? There's so many elements of what does it mean to be doing DevOps, but this is in kind of rank order of responses.

Continuous integration can use continuous deployment. That's often our starting point. As I mentioned earlier, automated testing Yep.

Makes total sense. 'cause that way we're doing testing as we check in code, maybe even testing within our ides as we're doing development code scanning, looking for vulnerabilities. It's very common practice infrastructure is code 51%.

That's the first one that jumps out at me is like, hmm, okay, doesn't mean we're all doing terraform. Maybe we're using a third party tool to do some of that. We may be using some infra infrastructure provider, cloud provider tools to do that as well.

Um, that's, that's interesting. And now we get into the distinction between uh, continuous delivery and con continuous deployment. Some people break those out, have very firm definitions.

Many people don't have quite as much. So you probably folks clicked on both or selected both of those. 5%.

I think that goes to the complexity question also, right? The ops of course. Um, but being able to manage the code that we are deploying, especially if we're doing cloud native DevSecOps as a practice, 47%.

I'd love to dig into this more and I have some, uh, some beliefs and some data to back up some of those. I know those are, are hypotheses about what's happening in DevSecOps, but that's for another time. Security testing, sy, S-R-I-S-R-E platform engineering, 34% testing and production feature flags.

You know, of all the things we listed, feature flags is at the, at 18% at the bottom. Doesn't mean it's not important, it's just not as many people are doing that. Alright, I feel like I'm at the response to the presidential state of the union drinking my water here.

So thanks for in there with me. Okay, so let's talk about platforms. We all avert about platform engineering.

The i the idea of doing a better job of creating the kind of platform, standardizing those, using fewer configurations, et cetera. And that's, in some ways we look at that as a, I dunno if it's a spinoff or an an expansion into other areas. Some people say platform engineering guild, DevOps.

Definitely not in my opinion. Clearly the data doesn't show that. Um, but it is a discipline that was much needed and I think has brought a lot of value.

What's happened though is in the DevOps space is we are moving from individual tools that we as practitioners or US practitioners get to integrate and try to build pipelines with and then try to figure out what to do with the data across all of these different tools to, to leverage for what's our metrics, what's our productivity? Where we running into problems, where we might, we apply AI to some of that data. And platforms are about a couple of things.

One is having a shared data structure, an infrastructure, whether that's a platform or a database or a data lake or some combination data model of how data across different parts of the SDLC can be leveraged. So I can look down the pipeline and see, okay, here's where we're hitting bumps in the road. I don't have to try to figure out the differences between five different tools, tools.

And another is being able to build workflows, seamless workflows across multiple steps that would have to cross boundaries of functional tools in the organization. So when we asked about that, what is your organization's most common approach to using DevOps solutions? Are you doing, are you using, uh, things that are platforms to DevOps platforms, if you will?

Primarily individual standalone DevOps tools. 25% an equal combination of both platforms and individual tools. 39 40%, primarily an integrated DevOps platform.

32%. So we see kind of a nice breakdown. Again, a bit of a a a distribution curve, bell curve on that.

Uh, will you move to an integrated dev DevOps platform solution over the next 12 to 18 months? 16%, yes. 29% said currently investigating, uh, 37%.

I'm not sure whether that's not quite our 32% on the other side, but on the other question, but you know, in the range, um, say they're already on it. So you can see we've got, almost half of the respondents have the people considering either they're going or moving to considering moving to some kind of a platform solution for DevOps. So that might point you in the direction of ideas.

Um, reducing integration, some of that complexity that we talked about before. Now, CICD being the middle of that, that oftentimes is a path to platforms and we have a significant number of people, um, that are reporting. You know, we use 1, 2, 3.

Not uncommon to have that many see a lot of drop off until we get to 10 plus. And then of course a good percentage, like, I don't know. I mean, no, we're not even tracking that.

But some people are running a lot of different, a lot of platforms, variations of CI I-C-I-C-D solutions I should say. And that could drive a lot of complexity. Sometimes you need to do that.

For example, deploying in different environments, different technologies. I'm running Python here and pearl here and go and rust and whatever it might be that I'm trying to do this, these deployments across different production environments. So sometimes it's a necessity to do that.

Uh, but are you considering replacing or upgrading one or more CSED solutions the next 12 to 18 month? 32%. A third saying yes, no, not quite a third, 27%.

Currently assessing needs is another 28%. So again, you've got 60% of the market who is retooling, continue to evolve their infrastructure and just 'cause you aren't doing that now, it doesn't mean you might not do that down the road, but the good news from the vendor side of it, of course, you know, they're happy to see that you're, you're looking at making some changes. And if you're also looking to move a platform to a platform approach that kind of informs maybe their product strategy as well or certain your, at your questions.

If you're practitioner to, uh, one of the technology providers, something else that goes, you know, cloud pro DevOps is kind of a family of things, right? A lot of things happened with DevOps when we started introducing this kind of an approach Yes. Tools, et cetera.

But we also leveraged DevOps to be able to do cloud native, right? Could you imagine doing, uh, microservices on a, on any significant scale, uh, without DevOps, right? Being able to do this incrementally and deployed into test and production environments?

Probably not. I can't, we had a really nice debate about that on a panel one time, but also observability coming along with it as, as in parallel with, if you wanna say with DevOps, however you choose to look at that. Is your organization deploying cloud native applications using microservices?

56% said yes. And I've seen data to validate this. Uh, we have a a a paper, white paper coming out, uh, one that's sponsored by Docker, looking at, uh, in companion with their kind of stated development report manager's guide to doing development.

Definitely recommend checking that out. All included in the description for you. You can download that.

But cloud native microservices, you know, depending on your definition of cloud native, definitely part of the picture here. Does your organization utilize observability tools? Now here's an important point is it isn't just in operations, right?

It is operations, but it's also security development. We see a lot of increase of people using observability and development for their own triage work, investigations, all that kind of stuff. So, uh, customer experience, another great way.

That's one of the things I was very excited about, uh, observability in the beginning is being able to put some measurements in place to measure what's the response time to the end customer? Do we see abandon rates, increases, we deploy code, whatever it might be, and ultimately driving it to business KPIs. Now, not as many people are on those last two areas, certainly in the testing development, et cetera, operations and security for sure.

But that's looks to me like a growing trend, uh, where we have more and more people using observability in that way. So I mentioned platform engineering. I, you know, in, in jest labeled it here, friend or foe, it's definitely friend.

Maybe there's a few folks that feel strongly and, uh, don't like DevOps or whatever. Frankly, most many, I don't know if it's most, many organizations who doing platform engineering are also the DevOps people or, or doing the DevOps function. So why are you adopting platform engineering, increased developer productivity?

I really like that. Standardize on a set number of configurations, reduce cost, decrease complexity, improve security, better infrastructure management, deploy your applications at greater scale provision, uh, dev test production environments faster. Developers will appreciate that, obviously.

So there's a lot of important things, and one of the things I think platform engineering has been so successful at, at like DevOps is it's, it's very adaptable to what the needs of your organization are. You may have a down with configurations and all of that, but you need better security in those, in those configurations and those platforms you're deploying. Or maybe you, maybe you've got so many things that you're doing, you just need to simplify and decrease some of the complexity.

And I think that's a big reason why we see platform engineering being adopted so favorably. How would you characterize your organization's embrace of platform engineering? Pervasive adoption?

You know, we're in the 20, 21% range, somewhat in places. 40%, uh, blue experimenting. Yeah, right, just below point 30%, right?

Right around 20, 28 or so. So we're, we're in this adoption curve, but we've made a lot of progress in platform engineering happening in parallel or with this part of DevOps, depending on how you choose to look at it. I, I, I look at it this way 'cause it's not just platform engineering.

You know, we have SecOps, we have DevSecOps, we have finops, we have, uh, GI ops, we have a whole number of e even sustainability ops. And, and you know, I kind of come to call this X ops, right? I call it the long tail of DevOps, meaning it isn't DevOps, you're not doing necessarily software creation as part of that process, but you're taking the principles behind DevOps.

And this is something the report describes, I think really well, kind of breaking that down and into what its core elements are and why and why DevOps isn't just actually, it isn't just a tech, it isn't just about creating software. It's about how to do a lot of different kinds of works work. And it's not any surprise given how it's come out of, uh, total quality management, demming and, uh, and Toyota manufacturing and so many different disciplines that can contributed to this.

So, uh, just some stats that we collected, how many people were doing GI ops? Um, you know, you can see it in the kind of, at the strong adoption in the low twenties, somewhat adopted a little bit in the low thirties. Same thing around gen ops.

Um, you see that in the high teens, strong adoptions kind of, uh, high twenties, 20% ish range. Also, does your organization have a sustainability effort related to DevOps? 59%.

And I think this is really fantastic because a lot of us have sort of a causality or causation, whatever you want to, whatever the right word is to say, there's things that we believe in that we need to improve about energy consumption or more efficient software or, uh, MA making, uh, using only resources as we need them as opposed to over provisioning. A lot of things that we look at as like, we could do this in a better way. The sustainability has helped bring some of those questions to light.

So we might do things in operations or DevOps, um, or delivery, SRE, any and any number of those areas. But it, it was interesting to me of, you know, we asked all these different dimensions and the lowest one, well, not counting none of the above, but the lowest one was 28%. That's pretty phenomenal.

Um, so it is, sustainability is, is a big part of why we're doing this. So please check that out too. Now.

So the, the, the, the, at the end of the day, how do we feel about DevOps and where we're headed? Well, how would you describe the future of DevOps? You know, I, people ask me when I give this talk, so if DevOps run its course or what's the next thing gonna replace it?

Um, we kind of worn out, its welcome. We need to do something else, or do we need to remarket it or brand it, you know, maybe that way in some organizations. But when you look at the data and you saw how, you know, how strongly the adoption is still happening, um, when we asked this question, just generally, what's your, what's your sense, what's your feeling about the future of DevOps?

50% said very positive. 38% said positive. So on the positive end of the scale, you've got 88% of people saying, I think of DevOp, there's a bright future for DevOps, either bright or good, depending on how you wanna define very positive and, and, uh, positive neutral, 10% kind of, eh, me, you know, that kind of response.

5%, man, I I, I, I don't think I've ever worked on anything that had that kind of positive response. So not that I'm claiming any credit, but it's good to see that, um, we're having such positive results and, and positive outlook on the future for DevOps. com, you can click on the QR code.

I promise there's no, um, malware in this, uh, QR code created it myself, so I know where it goes. It's a free report. It's about 30, 32 pages I believe.

Um, but it's very visual like you've seen in the data here and some with some really nice narrative. I also wanna point, we have a couple of new releases. I mentioned the Docker leadership guide to application development in the age of cloud native containers and microservices QR code on the bottom right for that, that's available today.

Uh, you can go to go to that page and download it. Also, we did a, uh, some analysis around AI's role in DevOps. Uh, we did this in the April May timeframe and released it in July.

Really it's just findings, you know, it is making an impact trying to get past the hype of AI and say, what are we really doing? And I call it DevOps, but software creation where we're using in test development, operations, security, things like that. Those are all free.

Help yourself to that. Love to have you, uh, take advantage of that for me. You know, you may, you probably see me on LinkedIn or on Techstrong TV or any number of those places.

And, uh, if you haven't checked on Techstrong Gang, it's a show that we do five days a week, uh, new content every day. There's a group of us, three to five people, um, from different disciplines depending on what the topic of the day is from infrastructure to legislation that might impact AI to new DevOps, things that are happening, cloud security, whatever it might be. Definitely check it out.

It starts at 9:30 AM uh, on the east eastern time zone and it's, uh, played throughout the day. You can go toron TV and watch that as well as the content lineup. The same inter kind of interviews we've been doing for a number of years now.

You can also check out, uh, my new research as part of Fu futurum. com. You can check me out there.

So I'll be a coup coupon. You're coming to Salt Lake City, please stop by. I'll be coming to OpenText world and also to reinvent and who knows where else.

We're almost at the end of the year, but there'll be a whole bunch of stuff happening, uh, coming up as part of the new year that I'm sure I'll be able to catch you at. So thank you for watching. Appreciate you, uh, being part of this talk with us.

I wish you the best on your job DevOps journey. Please reach out. Let me know if there is anything you find interesting or things you don't find helpful or maybe questions we haven't answered yet that we can help you with.

com. Thank you. Have a great rest of the conference.

We'll talk to you soon.