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Rackspace has announced the findings of a global study into the uptake of DevOps[1] programmes for application delivery within businesses of over 250 employees.
The study, which polled 700 IT decision-makers across the UK, US and Australia, reveals that the UK is significantly behind the other markets in terms of DevOps adoption.
Nearly a third (32%) of the 250 UK respondents surveyed was not familiar with the concept of DevOps. Of those that were familiar with it, only four in ten have actually implemented DevOps practices. These businesses are reaping commercial gains from their DevOps implementations, including a reduction in application downtime (41%), increased customer conversion (40%) & customer engagement (34%) and reduced IT infrastructure spend (32%).
“With 66% of US businesses and 50% of Australian businesses having already implemented DevOps practices; UK companies are compromising the ability to compete on a global level by not acknowledging the latest approaches to developing and deploying software,” says Chris Jackson, CTO of DevOps Services, Rackspace. “By reacting slowly to new methods which can significantly reduce IT costs, British businesses may find themselves unable to operate as efficiently as other regions. This is a big problem considering the IT sector is regarded as being key to the UK’s future economic success.”
The need for DevOps
The UK businesses surveyed build and release an average of 17 new applications every year, and upgrade or release new features to existing apps 77 times per year.
With such a significant number of releases each year, DevOps is an opportunity for UK businesses to increase speed, improve stability and make cost-savings in their software application development process. This is highlighted by those already implementing DevOps boasting faster time to market for new features (49%), more stable operating environments (45%) and improved collaboration of project teams (38%).
Setting DevOps goals around the business
Drilling down into the key differences between the three countries sheds light on some key pointers that UK businesses could take from their international counterparts:
· US and Australian businesses showed they worked on the more cultural aspects of DevOps practices as a priority: fully integrating the development team and the operations team (53% and 56% respectively) and aligning DevOps goals to business goals (56% and 38% respectively).
· In contrast, 36% of UK respondents have fully integrated development and operations teams and 31% have aligned DevOps and business goals.
· UK respondents were more likely to focus on technical DevOps practices as a priority – 41 per cent had implemented application monitoring and 39% automated testing.
Finding DevOps leaders
The results around ownership and objective-setting for DevOps programmes provides further insight as to the UK’s slow adoption rate:
· US and Australian companies planning to implement DevOps overwhelmingly see it as being peer-led by the operations team (56% and 47% respectively).
· UK firms are more unsure of who should own the process, with 28% saying the operations team, 24% the development team and 20% CIO.
· UK operations teams were far less resistant to the cultural change of DevOps (24%) than operations teams in the US (42%) and Australia (40%).
· Developers in the UK (31%) showed the most resistance to change.
· Of the firms that have implemented DevOps, over a third of UK businesses (36 per cent) said they did not have any DevOps specific roles.
Jackson adds: “DevOps is essentially a process that unites around serving the customer. In an ideal world that’s more than just developers and operators, but that is where it starts. The research shows that UK businesses need to do more to instil core DevOps principles of breaking down traditional team siloes and aligning development and deployment goals around the wider business’ commercial objectives. The benefits have come across loud and clear in this study so it is time for UK businesses to consider DevOps as a core high-tech business differentiator.”
