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In its newly published State of Database DevOps survey, Redgate Software offers some fresh insights into who is adopting DevOps, and how many of them are including the database. 1,000 companies and organizations from around the world participated in the survey, over half of which employ 500 people or more. With an equal split of respondents at developer level and manager level or above, the results present the most accurate picture ever gathered of the true state of DevOps for the database today.
Chief among the findings is that 47% of respondents have already adopted a DevOps approach to some or all of their projects – and a further 33% plan to adopt it during the next two years. Notably, rates of current adoption increase with company size, reaching 59% among companies with over 10,000 employees. However, only one fifth of respondents are applying DevOps practices like continuous delivery to their database, as well as their application.
A deeper analysis of the results provides some fascinating details about the sectors where DevOps is particularly favored. The highest levels of adoption are in IT Services and Retail, with Finance and Healthcare not far behind.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there are lower levels of adoption in the Government, Education, and Non-Profit sectors, where a higher number of respondents also thought it unlikely they would adopt this new way of working within the next two years.
Among those heading towards DevOps, the biggest barrier they face is a lack of appropriate skills in the team, highlighting a need for more education and training. For those respondents with no plans to move towards a DevOps way of working, a lack of awareness of the business benefits of DevOps is cited as the main obstacle, followed by a lack of budget to spend on new tooling.
When it comes to integrating database changes into a DevOps process, the main driver is to increase the speed of delivery of database changes. However, as to be expected, priorities vary according to the role of survey respondents.
Developers want to be freed to do more value-added work, for example, whereas database administrators are driven by a desire to reduce application downtime and improve collaboration between development and operations teams. IT directors and C-level executives are more concerned with the need to minimize the risk of losing data.
While the greatest challenge to database DevOps is seen to be applying consistency across application and database development, 68% of those who have already adopted DevOps practices say it would take less than a year to move to a fully automated database development process.
The results of the survey are particularly useful for Redgate, which has already helped many major companies and organizations extend DevOps practices to SQL Server databases.
“We’ve been helping our customers to improve the way they make changes to their databases for over 17 years now,” says Kate Duggan, Redgate Product Marketing Manager. “This survey has highlighted that our customers are facing increasing pressure to speed up the delivery of software, and include the databases in the same processes they use for their applications. It means we can ensure we’re in a good position to help them overcome the particular challenges the database brings.”
As a direct result of the survey, Redgate is co-hosting a webinar with James Betteley, Head of Education at the DevOpsGuys, on Wednesday, 25 January, at 4pm GMT.
Called ‘DevOps 101 – An Introduction to DevOps’, the webinar will look at the history of DevOps, why it started, the problems it’s intended to solve, and how companies and organizations can start implementing it for both their application and their database.
