Organisations that conflate DevOps and automation will find it hard to advance, report

The presence of a DevOps team is often a bad sign, Puppet's annual report finds

DevOps is not just about automation, although in companies that get stuck in their evolution, the two are frequently synonymous. That's one of the findings of Puppet's annual DevOps survey State of DevOps Report 2021 which was published this week.

No-one would argue that automation is not a vital component of DevOps. Attempting to improve the velocity, quality and security of software development at scale without implementing CI/CD or infrastructure as code would be a truly thankless task. Rather, automation is insufficient on its own.

"Large portions of our industry led with a focus on technology without setting out to change the way work happens, which is - fundamentally - culture," the report notes.

For engineers, automation is the easiest part of the equation. Unfortunately, this can lead to the creation of silos, typified by the existence of a 'DevOps team', which automates its own domains but has little influence outside. Fortunately, Puppet's survey of 2,560 IT professionals finds the practice of setting up specialist DevOps teams rather than embedding the practice is declining, down from a peak in 2018.

The report categorises organisations by their DevOps maturity. Not surprisingly, the numbers at the bottom end of the scale have been declining year-on-year, but the proportion of ‘highly evolved' organisations (characterised by the presence of cross-functional teams making good use of automation and cloud and operating across departments), has only grown slowly, with the vast majority (78 per cent) stuck somewhere in the middle, a figure that has barely moved. Computing Delta surveys over the years have noted a similar pattern.

Organisations in this middle stage have some automation and DevOps practices in place, and have enjoyed success in streamlining flows in a few areas, but in the main the development of products and services is still characterised by multiple hand-offs between different teams, and they are not making the most of the cloud and DevOps tools they have to hand.

"It's unsurprising that highly evolved groups have automated most of their repetitive tasks, and that they perceive this automation as improving the quality of their work, as this has given them the capacity to focus on higher order improvements," Puppet's report says.

"Yet we see that our mid-level group still has a lot of room for improvement, and the folks at the lower levels of evolution have barely scratched the surface."