Today, DevOps processes such as CI/CD and IaC are increasingly critical to the success of the hybrid cloud. A new CloudBolt industry insight report, “The Truth About DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey,” found that only 4% of respondents consider themselves CI/CD experts. Only 4% of respondents consider themselves to be CI/CD experts. The majority of respondents (76%) considered their CI/CD maturity level to be ‘intermediate’.
The report is based on a global survey of 200 IT and DevOps leaders from companies employing at least 1,000 people, 75% of whom hold VP and above positions.
In the report, CloudBolt states that “CI/CD has evolved to the point where it is now widely accepted as the best approach to modern application development and deployment. Although the concepts behind CI/CD have been around for decades, most organisations are still in their infancy.”
While 97% of respondents agreed that being able to test a CI/CD infrastructure is critical, and 85% of respondents do perform that testing. However, only 11% of respondents felt that their CI/CD infrastructure was reliable, with 69% saying that their CI/CD infrastructure was somewhat reliable; and 21% saying that their platform was somewhat unreliable or not reliable at all.
One of the well-known promises of CI/CD is that it can deploy applications multiple times per day; however, only 5% of respondents actually achieve this, with the majority (85%) stating that their organisation only deploys code once a week or once a month.
On average, 69% of respondents noted that it takes days or even weeks to deploy a single CI/CD pipeline. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said that there are too many manual processes involved in setting up the pipeline infrastructure. A further 56% of respondents noted that they do not have an automated process for post-deployment tasks.
53% said that proactive detection of infrastructure issues was a challenge; and 55% said that it was difficult to create a consistent CI/CD pipeline environment across multiple development teams. Overall, respondents identified three factors that hinder reliability including lack of automation, consistency and proactivity.
They felt that reliability could be improved by automating to speed up configuration (70%), continuously detecting infrastructure issues to reduce testing challenges (62%) and proactively simplifying the fixing of infrastructure issues (56%). “Only by creating better speed, awareness and remediation can CI/CD ultimately deliver on its promise.”