Enterprise understanding of DevOps grows, but key benefits prove elusive

Rackspace has revealed further insight from a global study into the uptake of DevOps programmes for application delivery, comparing midsize businesses (250-1000 employees) with enterprises (more than 1,000 employees). The study, which polled 700 IT decision-makers across the UK, US and Australia, reveals that enterprises are catching up with their more nimble midsize counterparts to achieve their DevOps goals.

Challenging the reputation that they are slow to respond to industry developments, nearly two thirds (63%) of the UK respondents at enterprises were actually familiar with the concept of DevOps, catching up with midsize businesses where just under three quarters (73%) were familiar with the concept. Nearly four in ten (38%) of those at large organisations have actually implemented DevOps practices, just behind smaller businesses where 42% had. A further third (35%) of respondents at enterprises have plans to implement DevOps, meeting the ambitions of midsize organisations (35%).

However, the way in which the two groups use DevOps differs. UK enterprises have been mainly focused on application monitoring (50%) and production support (50%) while just under a third (30%) fully integrated their development team with their operations team (compared to 41% midsize businesses).

These findings show that although the understanding within enterprises of what DevOps is looks healthy, this is not reflected in the activities they are prioritising such as better monitoring which does not tackle the full scope of DevOps challenges. Whilst enterprises are making a good start towards DevOps, it will seemingly take more time for the improving understanding of the concept to build improved bridges between developers and operations, rather than merely triggering more advanced automation and monitoring.

Chris Jackson, CTO of DevOps Services, Rackspace, said: “DevOps is becoming front of mind for large UK enterprises, yet we are still not seeing as many implementation success stories coming from this group as from small and medium-sized organisations. To really take advantage of the benefits DevOps has to offer, larger enterprises with more complex internal structures need to realise it’s not just the relationship between developers and operations that matters. It could be the relationship between developers and corporate security, or between operations and sales. Applying the principles of DevOps to other relationships in the business will help large enterprises come out with a really successful DevOps story.”

Here are some other DevOps challenges and benefits that were evident from the research findings:

Challenges:
· The top reasons UK businesses do not plan to implement DevOps practices are:
o Having other more urgent IT priorities – 50% of midsize businesses and 44% of enterprises
o Not knowing what the process entails – 50% of enterprises and 34% of midsize businesses
o Seeing DevOps as an industry buzzword was a problem for 22% of enterprises.
o The business not understanding the value of DevOps was a problem for 27% of midsize businesses.

Benefits:
· UK enterprises have nearly double the amount of releases compared to smaller businesses (23 releases on average each year compared to 12).
· Enterprises also have more than four times the number of upgrades and new features for existing applications with 127 each year on average, compared to 30 for midsize businesses.
· Increased speed is another advantage. This is evident in the number of enterprises already implementing DevOps boasting faster time to market for new features (41%) and more stable operating environments (39%).