How CI/CD and IaC Practices Factor into the New Cloud Order

If you haven’t heard, CloudBolt has released its second CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) report, this one focusing on the results of a survey of over 200 global IT leaders on the topics of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and infrastructure-as-code (IaC).

This survey, powered by Pulse Research’s platform, highlighted the connectivity between DevOps, hybrid cloud, and digital transformation. We at CloudBolt believe this shows how important these processes are to the formation and development of a new way of thinking when it comes to cloud. We’ve coined a term to describe it: the New Cloud Order.

A Reminder on the New Cloud Order

As a refresher, this is how we view the New Cloud Order at CloudBolt: old, siloed, myopic ways of doing business no longer cut it. Not when technology, tools, processes, and ideas change as rapidly as they do now. Think about all the change in the world since the beginning of 2020.

There has been a reordering of strategic priorities that require comprehensive solutions and improvement in three key areas: automation, optimization, and integration. That’s where the New Cloud Order comes into play. It demands simplification of complexities using intelligent, agile, and interdependent approaches to vexing hybrid cloud problems.

To face the New Cloud Order, organizations must provide simple and effortless self-service capabilities, optimize cloud costs intelligently, automatically informing and remediating gaps in real-time, and make clear investment in automation tools to integrate systems in a scalable way free of custom code.

What the New CII Report Tells Us About the New Cloud Order

The truth about the state of DevOps is still evolving as developers and ITOps struggle to find reliable common ground and contribute more fully in the New Cloud Order. Gaps in reliability, interoperability, testing, governance, ease of use, integration, and visibility combine to stymie efforts to advance CI/CD and leverage IaC for competitive advantage.

While progress is being made for DevOps, CII data proves much improvement is still necessary before reality matches exuberance and hype lives up to promise.

When it comes to CI/CD, reliable infrastructure for DevOps pipeline is important beyond just the act of development. Organizations need those pipelines to work for innovation to grow, digital business to proliferate, and for competition to be squashed.

Consider this: while 97% of our respondents agree that testing CI/CD infrastructure is important and 85% claim to regularly test that infrastructure, only 11% of companies believe their CI/CD infrastructure is very reliable. 69% characterize it as only somewhat reliable, and fully 21% say theirs is somewhat unreliable or not reliable at all.

As for IaC and Terraform, there’s a lot of desire to make it work, but so far the proof isn’t really in the pudding. Fully 88% of respondents indicate that they are either using or considering using Terraform. However only 5% are very satisfied with the platform. 58% cite a lack of cost visibility into infrastructure deployed by Terraform as a key shortcoming. 53% call out the lack of visibility of who is using Terraform, while 42% of respondents say that they have a fear of ungoverned Terraform plans being executed by other teams.

In the end, these areas must improve and work together for the New Cloud Order to fully take shape.

We’re here to help you anywhere on your hybrid and multi-cloud journey. Request a demo today.