Transcript: DevOps Decrypted Ep. 3 - The State of DevOps
Transcript
Romy Greenfield:
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another DevOps Decrypted podcast. Today we're going to be speaking about the state of DevOps. Today, we've got myself Romy Greenfield, my colleague, Jobin Kuruvilla, and Lisa Schaffer as well. Sadly, Matt, can't be with us today.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Hello, hello.
Lisa Schaffer:
Hello, hello everyone.
Romy Greenfield:
Cool. So let's get onto it. We've released the State of Atlassian report, and we've got some key takeaways from that, but let's start with speaking about the state of DevOps. Has anyone got any input on that?
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Yeah, it was really interesting because I think Adaptavist as a company had been releasing the State of Atlassian report for few years already. And this was a first time DevOps made it into the report. And that I found was really interesting. That of course means that DevOps is becoming a critical strategy for not just Adaptavist, Atlassian also will land probably for the whole world right now. So I found that very interesting. I don't know what others think about it.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. I think Atlassian has made great strides including some of those sort of tools to support their DevOps journey.
Romy Greenfield:
Yeah. So that brings me on to the fact that a lot of large enterprises seem to be adopting DevOps practices.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Not surprising. Obviously the first question that Adaptavist asked people was what are the kinds of organizations are adopting DevOps these days and large enterprises, unsurprisingly continue to be the biggest adopter. I think that actually goes very well with what we are saying internally as well, from a consultant's point of view. Most of the organizations that we work with for DevOps engagements are definitely large enterprises. So I think it matches with what we have seen.
Lisa Schaffer:
It's good to note though, why are we moving towards a DevOps way of working? Why is DevOps strategy important to larger organizations? And to also realize that there's a lot of need to automate those mundane tasks that cost a lot of money. And so reducing the manual work that needs to be done is a large driver for larger organizations.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Yeah. That is actually a separate poll that we have conducted to identify what are the biggest drivers for adoption of DevOps. That then shows us why large enterprises are adopting it more. But I think we had this conversation last time when Matt was here talking about is it easier to adopt DevOps in a startup versus in a large enterprise. And we all agreed that it's actually harder to adopt DevOps in a larger enterprise. If it was like a startup, then the person who is implementing it, they can easily convince others. It's a small group. And there is not actually a lot of difficulty in implementing what somebody comes up with as opposed to large entreprises where the culture could be resistant to something like Agile or DevOps and it takes a lot, probably a top-down approach from the management to let everybody adopt something as big as Agile or DevOps.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
I think probably if you look at the past few years or even the last decade, DevOps had been a thing for the last one decade and enterprises have started adopting it more and more in the last few years, because people had been seeing the advantages of adopting something like DevOps. And although they stayed away from it in the initial few years, now they're starting to come more to it, I think.
Romy Greenfield:
Yeah. I feel like when something's been out for a certain period of time, that's when the big companies are like, "Okay. The early adopters have taken all of the hits for us so we've got some more information now, now we're ready to try and take it on."
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Exactly. Now we see the value. Plus we also have some learnings that we can take away from the previous adopters or the early adopters. It's the perfect strategy, I guess.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. I think it goes back to the culture of the company. Because if you look at those startups, they're a lot more keen to try the bleeding edge technology and to fail quickly, fail fast and they can redirect as they go. Whereas large organizations, it costs a lot of money to fail and redirect. And sometimes it takes long periods of time to redirect. A good analogy is the Titanic. How much effort does it take to turn a Titanic versus a small ski boat?
Jobin Kuruvilla:
That's an interesting point, because that brings me to a key observation in the report which says verticals like automotive, energy and manufacturing organizations, they are the slowest to adopt, they're the Titanics. They are the slowest to adopt something like DevOps. But what also stood out was they have the highest future adoption intentions, so they do want to adopt, which is what was standing out. Obviously, right now, lack of skills and budget constraints sighted as the biggest issues why they are not adopting it. But I think it's because they are Titanic as you said.
Lisa Schaffer:
A lot of red tape to get through and leadership buy-in. If you go back to how do we attack writing out the scaled Agile framework, because obviously that's one of the building blocks getting to DevOps or DevOps culture? If you don't have that leadership buy-in, trying to have the rest of the organization move is very difficult. And like you were saying earlier, Jobin, those small startups, it's easier to convince and show the value quickly in a smaller company versus a really large company where you can't necessarily always get to those C level type people to convince them of that value. In the report, it states that some businesses cite the lack of a tangible business value was missing and was a deterrent for moving to something like a DevOps way of working.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Yeah. In terms of the verticals, as I said, the bigger companies and the industries like automotive, energy, manufacturing, as we said earlier, they're slow to adopt and it makes sense. But one thing that didn't make any sense to me was in terms of regions, for some reason, the Americans actually have a faster adoption to DevOps and Europe is still lagging behind. I was actually planning to make fun of Matt if he was here but unfortunately he's not. I'm thinking probably we should make fun of Romy. Romy, what's the reason? Why do you think UK is so slow for everything? You don't know the metric system, the right one.
Romy Greenfield:
We're slow because we like to queue, we like to wait our turn for things so we're just all lining up one by one, whereas the Americans they're just hoarding at the short run.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
But it was an interesting theme that came up. For some reason, UK seems to be suffering the most from budget constraints and that was the biggest barrier for adoption. And for some reason, Americans have shown the highest adoption rate if you compare it with UK or the rest of Europe.
Romy Greenfield:
Maybe that has something to do with the economies.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Probably.
Romy Greenfield:
I don't want to say too much.
Lisa Schaffer:
I'm sure the pandemic has had a big impact.
Romy Greenfield:
Definitely.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Definitely. Yeah. But looking at how the world is split, we can see that... Not the world, actually, how the anti-recepients of this survey were split, you can see that only less than 10% said we are not ready for DevOps to be part of our strategy. And about 50 to 60% said, "We have already implemented a DevOps strategy." And the rest of the people, they said they are hoping to implement a DevOps strategy in the next three years. That's huge. Only less than 10% of big companies that we interviewed said, "We do not want to have DevOps as part of our strategy." So things are looking promising.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah, definitely. I feel like on the regions as well, I think over half of our respondents were based in Europe as well so that could skew the figures a little bit, but general trends speaking, yes, definitely.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
And in terms of why did you decide to implement the DevOps strategy, which was the next question, there were different answers to it. And the biggest try was, if you start looking at it, the first one is very obvious. People wonder what may or may not work first. And I think that is one of the reasons why everybody wants to implement a pipeline, a DevOps pipeline they want to automate as much as they can. It kind of resonates with what we have seen while we are going to customers implementing DevOps as well because it all starts with a conversation around, "We have Jenkins so we have this tool, we are doing some automation, how can you help us improve it? We have a couple of folks who are doing it, installing the tool and configuring it, but that's not going to scale well. So how can you help us scale that to an enterprise level?" That's where it all starts. So I think it makes perfect sense that automating manual workflows, that's one of the biggest driver for adoption of DevOps.
Lisa Schaffer:
What about automating other things, Jobin, do you have any thoughts on that? Every DevOps thought leader that I follow or know of has a catchphrase of automate all the things. And I get that. We live in a society where we want instant gratification and that definitely flows over into the DevOps realm where we want to automate all the things. Yes, we do. So what else can we automate outside of-
Jobin Kuruvilla:
If you think about the past, people were thinking about DevOps as CA and CD, continuous integration, continuous deployment. And most of the 50% that we earlier talked about who have already adopted DevOps, I am pretty sure they already have some kind of pipelines for CA and CD already within their organization. And that's why they think we already have adopted DevOps as a strategy. Now, if you look at many of the trends in 2021 for example, you will see that infrastructure has scored, automating your infrastructure, that's fast becoming one of the emergent trends of DevOps, which was not the case earlier. People were only worried about deployment of the application. Now we are moving ahead and going to IaaC, infrastructure as code, and then automating all the infrastructure that we can which includes probably creating separate environments for the branches that you're working on.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Ephemeral environments which live only for a short period of time, which can then be taken down after testing in that particular environment instance. So all of that is right now happening. So automating not just the application deployment, but your infrastructure, how you feed it back to the developers using maybe ChatOps by sending messages into Slack. So many different ways that we are doing automation. And I believe those emerging trends like ChatOps, DataOps, AOps, whatever you want to call it, all [inaudible 00:12:43]. Actually, we made it into the report as well, because those are some of the things that we expect to see in the coming years in the State of Atlassian or DevOps. Yeah. So automate as much as you can. But it all starts with baby steps as we said in a previous call. So start by automating the manual work first, which is what is still the biggest driver.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
The other thing is the second one, I'm just looking at the report right now. The second one is the faster development cycles, which is again interesting because it then speaks to Agile as well. Because if you look at the development community, we already figured that shorter cycles, small iterations, two week sprints, that actually gives us more value compared to a two-month sprint or waiting two months to take the product in front of the customer. If you think really about it, you can do all development you want and you can iterate in two weeks, but unless it makes it into production, you're still lagging behind. So how can you have faster development as well as release cycles? That's where DevOps come in. So that is the second most driver for DevOps adoption.
Lisa Schaffer:
I almost feel like it shouldn't be having a sprint or shorter sprints to develop faster, it almost should be we want to provide business value faster.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Absolutely. Yeah. And that is why there is another emerging trend here, value stream mapping or value stream management. So you basically identify the value first, what is actually giving value to the customer. And then you want to limit the wastage. So if you take a look at any pipeline, you can see that certain stages there is wastage. Wastage in terms of time, waiting for an approval, a lot of different things, which doesn't directly add value to the customer. So you have to first identify that value and then do a value stream mapping and then reduce wastage by figuring out how we can cut short those cycles and produce only what is essentially needed for the next downstream stage.
Lisa Schaffer:
Jobin, We've spoken about a lot of moving parts here, and we've kind of kicked off some of the questions that were asked namely, do you have a DevOps strategy? You mentioned one thing about starting small, but how do organizations start with a strategy? Is it just waking up one day and saying, "Okay, I need to be DevOp." I think the key nuggets of wisdom that you can give to organizations is to say, "I want to develop a DevOps strategy, but I'm not quite sure how to start."
Jobin Kuruvilla:
I think that is where we come up with something called DevOps maturity assessment. We have spoken about it and we are actually planning to speak about it in detail in one of our podcasts. So basically, every customer, every organization has a different reason why they want to do DevOps. Obviously everybody wants to do things faster, bring business value faster to the customer, but they are facing different problems. And the first thing we need to identify is what is the problem that your organization is facing? If we go back to the report and if you take a look at all the different reasons people cited, automating manual workflows is one thing. But what are the other problems that they're trying to solve. Better coordination across teams, that was the third highest one. So obviously in some cases it's because of the lack of collaboration that things are not moving fast and they see DevOps as their way to bring better coordination across teams, improve time to market, which is an obvious one.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
You reduce the development cycles and you deliver faster, that improves the time to market. A consistency of approach is another one. So there are different teams within your organization. Some is following a different strategy, another one's following a completely different strategy. So there is no consistency across teams. That could be another reason why you want to adopt DevOps, visibility across the entire organization that brings us back to monitoring how you see from the top hierarchy, how is my teams doing and how I can get visibility across the different teams. So there's no one particular reason that will make you adopt DevOps. It could be different. So what we as consultants typically do is we go to the customer, we identify what are your reasons? How can we help there? So for that, you have to do a proper maturity assessment.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
And maybe when you do that, you will figure out that they also need some help with their agility. Maybe they need to scale their Agile performance organization so we might have to do some Agile mentoring workshops. That probably is going to be the first thing that we do there. So it's all about talking and identifying what that organization is struggling with and then figuring our a strategy for them. There's no one size that fits all.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. Thanks, Jobin. That's great, that input. I find it very interesting that improved time to market wasn't a higher percentage, it just reached just over 50% versus the automate manual workflows at around just over 80% of the reason why organizations want to implement DevOps strategy.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
I think it goes back to where are you seeing the most value? If you think clearly about it, you probably will see a lot of value as soon as you reduce the manual workflows, because most of the time wastage happens when you're waiting for one person to approve your workflow. Like for example you're developing every two weeks, you're packaging it properly. You have a continuous integration build which build, test, and then package it. It gets deployed into development enrollment. It gets deployed in the integration environment. That is all happening really fast. But then somebody from the QA team has to come and approve it before it can be then deployed to staging or production.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
And for that particular workflow alone, it can take days before the QA thing comes backs and then approves it because they are doing some manual testing and so on and so forth. Just by reducing that you may be going from deploying into production from six weeks down to two weeks or three weeks. You're just seeing a lot of value there. So that is probably the reason why a lot of people give that as the very first reason why they want to adopt DevOps.
Romy Greenfield:
So we talked a little bit about the biggest barriers to adoption, but there's quite a few in there. And in the report it says about 23% of respondents cited a lack of tangible business benefits as a barrier for DevOps adoption. So do you guys want to discuss a little bit more about why people might not be adopting it?
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Yeah. I think we were discussing more about why people want to adopt. Speaking about why people do not want to adopt, there's quite a lot of different reasons. Lack of tangible business benefits, that's an interesting one because I find it hard to believe that people cannot see the value in DevOps adoption. That's probably a case where we have to educate people. There's a lot of tangible benefits for DevOps adoption. We talked about it quite a bit in our last few podcasts. So I find it interesting that it even made to the list. But what is even more interesting is the very first one, lack of automation capabilities. That is the highest reason why people couldn't adopt DevOps. And it's a catch-22 because we're trying to automate and the lack of automation is preventing them from adopting DevOps. That I found very interesting.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
So I guess it again goes back to having somebody with the right skills, having somebody from Adaptavist, I would say. But yeah, somebody with the right skills to help them with starting with automation. And then obviously once you have that automation going on, they can see the value in what it is bringing to the organization and they will probably go from there.
Lisa Schaffer:
Just to add to that Jobin, one of the things that I've seen in larger organizations is, to automate is easy when you have greenfields development, but when you have legacy systems, it takes a lot of time and money to go back and automate a legacy system. And what you probably find is that maybe the reason for that answer is that there are already many legacy systems in large organizations, bespoke systems, financial services companies, large banks will build their own legacy systems or build their own systems but now they've become legacy and they can't just throw them away. They have to rebuild platforms. And so taking the time to stop, redirect their development effort back to going to rebuild all of that, is just a money pit. And so a lot of organizations are fearful of adopting this DevOps when they don't have the ability to automate, because they've got these older systems that they have to still look after and test and release product updates.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
That is an interesting one because a lot of the times, as you rightly mentioned, people think when they think of DevOps, they think you that you can do that only if everything is greenfield. Moving to cloud for example, moving to AWS, people think that, "Hey, we can move to AWS only if we completely rearchitect everything." But if you look at AWS or if you talk to the real AWS consultancy, there are different ways you can move to AWS, there is lift and shift, there is complete rearchitecting, so many different ways. Obviously you do not want to be replacing your mainframe systems with serverless architecture on day one. That's not exactly what you want to do. But all these cloud providers, some of them are coming up with different ways to maybe host your bigger servers in AWS, for example, on EC2 instances instead of containerizing it on first day or writing Lambda functions for it.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
So DevOps is not always about completely rearchitecting everything. And more and more, you would even see that there are hybrid approaches happening these days. And that's another reason why DevOps is now becoming popular. You can see increasing adoption and not doing DevOps for every single thing. Or maybe you're doing DevOps, but let's not confuse DevOps with one tool or one cloud vendor. So you are actually doing DevOps, but not specifically for one cloud vendor or one technology. You are doing hybrid approaches where some of your infrastructure might still remain OnPrem and some might be in cloud. And you might have different CA/CD pipelines deploying into different places. And some of them might be converted into microservices architecture. A few pieces of the application running as microservices using docker in Kubernetes, maybe in EKS, maybe in Google cloud somewhere, but still some part of the applications still remain OnPrem using an old mainframe core. That's still possible. That's how you take baby steps.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. That's a great point. You could potentially just automate some of the elements to at least provide that value quicker than you were in the past.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Speaking about the biggest barriers, budget constraints is still one of the biggest barriers. If you look at the list, you can still see that almost 40% of the people cited budget as one of the reasons why they cannot adopt DevOps. Again, it's like a catch-22 because one of the advantages of implementing DevOps is obviously you save money at the end. But it is a big shift and it is a cultural shift. You have to implement tools, you do need to budget. That could be one reason it's mostly the biggest entreprises that are adopting DevOps because they have the money and they can set it aside for something like this, whereas startups, they're still focusing on customer.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
They probably do not have the budget to do a complete overhaul of their development process unless they started at greenfield, like you were mentioning. New startups coming up, I am pretty sure everybody has a CA/CD pipeline designed and DevOps strategy in mind. Most of them are probably deploying into AWS or another cloud, the Google cloud, wherever it is. But for small companies who are already flying, probably they do not have a high priority for DevOps. They're still thinking about the customer and finding their feet.
Lisa Schaffer:
I was just having a look at the graph now. It's interesting that security concerns was such a low percentage when the sort of newest craze in town is DevSecOps. Why do you think that came in so low, Jobin, security concerns being under 5%?
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Well, if you look at it, you're looking at the biggest barrier to start. So security concern is not a barrier anymore. So people are not worried about security when they're adopting DevOps. In fact, it's the opposite. They actually want to adopt DevOps because they're more concerned about security. And hence the term DevSecOps. So if you take a look at DevSecOps, people are now increasingly concerned about security, whether it is deployed in the cloud, whether it is implementing OnPrem, you need to consider security, whether it is static analysis or dynamic analysis, checking vulnerabilities, whether it is against Docker containers, whether it is containers running in AWS. So that is like one of the primary focus these days. You take a look at any of the biggest breach that's happened over the last few years, that's all because of lack of security implementations in the organizations. And nowadays, that is the key focus whenever we start implementing DevOps. So that is why it's still less than 5%. Security concerns is no more a barrier. Everybody wants DevOps because they're more focused on security.
Lisa Schaffer:
I wanted to just ask a question. So from the Atlassian realm, obviously SaaS platform has been a big thing for them. The part of the growth strategy over the last few years. Data residency has played a huge role in stopping large organizations from moving to a SaaS platform. Are you seeing any of that in other sort of SaaS platforms in tooling at all?
Jobin Kuruvilla:
It is a big problem and good that you brought it up because that could be one reason Europe is actually a little hesitant because we all know that the data residency rules within Europe is a bit fickle than what we have in the US. That was one reason people actually were slow to adopt Atlassian Cloud, and Atlassian actually responded well to it and we have more places where you can host your data. And it is another security thing. People would want the data to be closer to them. They do not want data in a country that is probably in another continent. So it is something that we are seeing. And again, depending on the customer that you work with... In the US, you can even see that there are separate cloud for government companies.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
So obviously you can see that where your data resides and how you're maintaining it, that plays a huge factor in adopting SaaS platforms and even looking at different hosting providers. Looking at the biggest constraints or the biggest barriers to DevOps adoption, I do see that change to the system culture, it's still there, but it is less than 30%. And that's a positive I see in it because most of the time we keep saying that DevOps is also a cluster of things but this tells me that most of the people realize that now. Nowadays people already know that DevOps is not just one particular tool. That was the problem in the previous years. But now they're realizing that it's a cultural shift.
Lisa Schaffer:
Most organizations are starting to realize... First of all, building that trust that you mentioned earlier about having other companies be the Guinea pig and now that things have settled down a bit, we can start to adopt it. But also, it's not that fear anymore to jump in and actually have that cultural change take effect.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
One thing I found interesting in our report though is, when we were questioning the people, there were two different target audience. One was the decision-makers and then the other one was purchasing managers. What I thought was those two were probably thinking alike, purchasing managers, middle management, decision makers, probably C-level execs. They're probably thinking alike. But I want if some of our questions would have changed, if we were questioning DevOps teams, the boots on ground, probably they might have a different view of what are the biggest barriers for adoption. I can give you an example. In the biggest barriers, one of the least barrier or the least percentage was about lack of commitment or buy-in from leadership, only 10%. Obviously, if you're asking the leadership, they're going to say that. They're going to say that, "We are not a burden anymore."
Lisa Schaffer:
They're not going to self-incriminate.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Exactly. But if you ask people who are boots on the ground, people like me, people like folks in my team, they would say that the lack of commitment from leadership is one of the biggest barriers. It may not be true for all organizations, definitely not true for organizations who are adopting DevOps because they have the buy-in or they have the commitment from the leadership, that's the reason they are adopting DevOps. But for those organizations who are not adopting DevOps, that lack of commitment is probably a big factor because budget constraints. That's what I would say.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. I have to agree with you, Jobin. From my experience in dealing with DevOps teams or teams that are just itching to get into the DevOps realm and just not getting that buy-in. And if you don't get that buy-in, you don't have that bandwidth or that leeway to jump into a DevOps way of working because it means that you're starting to work as a DevOps organization and cultural changes need to happen. And the attitude towards it, it's no longer command and control, it's that decentralizing decision-making and authority, which a lot of large enterprises, they don't want to relinquish that down to the lower levels.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Yep, indeed. One thing I am probably interested in the next report, maybe, now that we have talked about what is in the current report, I would like to see what people see as the next emerging trend. There are a lot of emerging trends that we can speak to, like we spoke about serverless architecture for example. We spoke about DevSecOps. So there are a lot of different emerging trends. That's what we think. But we are DevOps consultants. We are the people who are experts. I would like to see how organizations think about what are the different emerging trends. I don't know, Lisa or Romy if you have a view on it. What exactly do you think is going to be the next big thing?
Lisa Schaffer:
I've been seeing a lot of murmurings around ChatOps, specifically in the sort of IT operations area. And I'm really keen to see what's going to happen around that. A lot of vendors starting to build-in chat functionality into their tooling, because collaboration is such an important facet of DevOps. I would really love to see. I think DevSecOps has kind of been around for a while.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
It's been, yeah.
Lisa Schaffer:
But ChatOps has not and I'm really interested in what's going to happen with that. I saw in a report was GitOps and I can't seem to remember the other one, but-
Jobin Kuruvilla:
DataOps or AOps?
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. AOps.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
I completely agree with you. Especially you would see that a company like Salesforce, I quit Slack only like six months back, they don't do that for no reason.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. Exactly.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
They definitely have a strategy around it. And it's going to be deeply embedded within their roadmap for the next few years. You have already seen what Microsoft has done with MS Teams. MS Teams is now deeply integrated with all the different Microsoft applications, including DevOps and everything. So the way chat applications are going to interact with, not just other applications, but also with the pipelines, it's going to drastically change. Obviously ChatOps is going to be an important thing to look out for. And we are already making strides with our Slack partnership in terms of how we can create integrations, implement ChatOps in our pipelines, those kinds of things. So we are already looking at it. We are ahead of the game. That's going to be the game. You are right.
Lisa Schaffer:
Yeah. I've also noticed other tools like Jira. If you want to spin up incidents, et cetera, you could do it right from Slack. There's lots of tools out there that allow you to do those kinds of things-
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Lots of integrations.
Lisa Schaffer:
... and write into your STK as well. Yeah.
Romy Greenfield:
Thank you all for listening to today's episode and that's all we've got time for. If you want to connect with us on social, you can at Adaptavist and let us know what you thought of today's show. But as for now, thank you Jobin and Lisa for having a good chin wack with me today and we'll see you on the next episode. Bye.
Jobin Kuruvilla:
Bye.
Lisa Schaffer:
Bye.