The Truth About CI/CD and Hybrid Cloud

It goes without saying: the world has changed a lot in the last 18 months. For organizations, it has meant that agility is the name of the game.

IT operations within enterprises have responded accordingly, adopting DevOps practices to develop and deliver IT services more quickly and more efficiently – without sacrificing quality. Practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) have gained traction to help developers rapidly deliver code changes via an automated pipeline.

A successful CI/CD pipeline requires high levels of automation and a flexible infrastructure. That’s why more development teams are adopting Infrastructure-as-Code as well, but we’ll discuss that more in the future.

CI/CD has evolved to the point where it is now widely accepted as the optimal approach for modern application development and deployment. Even though the concepts behind CI/CD have been around for decades, most organizations are still early on their journey. We took a closer look at this in our new CloudBolt Industry Insights (CII) report, The Truth About DevOps in the Hybrid Cloud Journey.

Leveraging Pulse Research’s proprietary platform and audience between May 7 and June 10, 2021, CloudBolt secured 200+ responses from senior titles (74% VP+) at large companies (>1,000 employees) around the world who had specific knowledge of IaC and CI/CD within their organizations.

Where CI/CD Falls on the Hybrid Cloud Landscape

Here are some of the key takeaways on the CI/CD portion of the survey:

• 76% of organizations say their CI/CD maturity level is intermediate. Only 3.5% consider their maturity level “expert” (with most of those being at the largest enterprises).
• Only 5% of companies surveyed indicated they deploy applications multiple times daily.
• Most companies (85%) admit to deploying on a weekly or even monthly basis.
• CI/CD pipelines remains less than instantaneous or continuous, with 70% saying that pipeline deployment on average takes days/weeks/or longer.
• While 97% of respondents agree that testing CI/CD infrastructure is important and 85% claim to regularly test that infrastructure, only 11% of companies actually 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.
• 63% say there are too many manual processes involved when setting pipeline infrastructure.

As for what is needed to improve the situation with CI/CD, more than half said they wanted to make provisioning infrastructure faster through automated processes, continuously detect
infrastructure issues to reduce testing challenges & failures, and simplify remediation of infrastructure issues proactively.

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