By Dick Stark

Earlier this year, BMC commissioned Salvatore Salamone to produce a 2019 State of DevOps Report summarizing the findings of an Interop / Information Week survey of 150 IT and application development professionals across all industries. Although similar in name to the more widely known Puppet State of DevOps annual report, the BMC report focused primarily around the survey and its results. Here is a short update of each report.

BMC 2019 State of DevOps Report:

• Most companies are familiar with DevOps and are using the strategy now or plan to do so within the year.
• Drivers for adoption include the need to develop, deploy, and support more applications in faster times.
• A plethora of tools and technologies are being used, evaluated, and purchased to support DevOps efforts.
• Expected benefits include greater speed-to-market, improved application performance, reduced downtime, and quicker fixes
• and updates.

Despite pressure to hold costs in check application proliferation means more not less applications, while digital transformation produces more competition meaning an even more rapid push for greater speed to market. And at the top of the list for DevOps investments? New tools, followed by redesigning processes to drive a DevOps approach.

On the other hand, the Puppet 2018 State of DevOps Report is much more prescriptive. This report presents the five stages of the DevOps evolution: build the foundation, normalize the technology stack, standardize and optimize, expand DevOps practices, automate infrastructure delivery and provide self-service. Here are a few of my takeaways–in no particular order:

• Change Management is becoming more agile. “Change management as it is traditionally applied is outdated. We know, for example, that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals, largely due to employee resistance and lack of management support. We also know that when people are truly invested in change, it is 30 percent more likely to stick.”
• Finely tuned Configuration Management tools are a strong indicator (by a factor of 27) of a highly evolved DevOps organization. Achieving configuration repeatability assures stable, reliable and secure production environments.
• Self Service. The two defining practices include automation of incident responses and resource availability via self-service. The more DevOps teams empower individuals, the less frustration results, and the more work gets accomplished. Likewise, incident automation improves resolution time and ensures that remediation processes are consistently applied.