Research reveals organisations struggle to scale DevOps

Dynatrace has published the findings of an independent global survey of 1,300 development and DevOps leaders, which revealed the primary challenges organizations are facing as they attempt to keep up with demand for digital innovation. The research highlighted that scaling DevOps and SRE practices is critical to accelerating the release of high-quality digital services. However, siloed teams, manual approaches, and increasingly complex tooling slow innovation and make teams more reactive than proactive, impeding their ability to drive value for the business. The 2021 global report, Deep Cloud Observability and Advanced AIOps are Key to Scaling DevOps Practices, is available for download here.

The research reveals:

• Increased pressure to release faster. On average, organizations expect to increase the frequency of their software releases by 58% in the next two years.

• Demands for faster releases put quality at risk. Nearly a quarter of respondents (22%) admit they’re often under so much pressure to meet the demand for faster innovation that they must sacrifice code quality.  

• Near universal agreement that DevOps is critical to achieve speed and quality. 98% of respondents say extending DevOps to more applications is key for digital transformation and optimizing customer experience. 

• Manual tasks are a barrier to accelerating innovation through DevOps. More than a quarter (27%) of DevOps teams’ time is spent on manual CI/CD tasks, which reduces time spent on innovation.

• Increased automation and end-to-end cloud observability are essential to DevOps. Organizations are investing in the automation of manual CI/CD tasks (62%), eliminating manual incident response (62%), and end-to-end observability (45%) to boost developer productivity.

• Extending AIOps across the software delivery cycle is key. 79% of respondents say extending AIOps beyond traditional use cases will play a critical role in the future success of DevOps and SRE practices.

• A unified platform is at the heart of DevOps success. 74% of respondents say end-to-end observability will be essential to DevOps in the future, and 71% of respondents say a unified platform that seamlessly integrates their toolchains will be critical to scaling DevOps beyond a single lighthouse project.

“In today’s hyper-digital age, organizations must deliver innovation faster than ever before. DevOps and SRE practices are critical to achieving this goal, but organizations are struggling to scale these to drive maximum speed, quality, and reliability,” said Andreas Grabner, Director of Strategic Partners at Dynatrace. “Development, DevOps, and SRE teams are still grappling with time-consuming manual processes, siloed cultures, and an explosion of alerts from their monitoring tools, which hinders their efforts to accelerate digital transformation. To overcome these challenges, organizations need a more intelligent solution that combines end-to-end observability, precise insights, and continuous automation. This will help teams to work together more effectively, and consistently deliver high-quality software faster and more efficiently.”