Maturing DevOps adoption increasingly embraces the database

The 2019 survey reveals that 85% of the 1,000+ organizations surveyed have either adopted DevOps, or have plans to do so in the next two years, up from 82% in 2018. Standard DevOps practices, such as version control, continuous integration and automated provisioning are being rolled out across both application and database teams, helping speed development and avoiding the database becoming a bottleneck. Overall, 57% of organizations surveyed have already adopted DevOps across some or all of their projects, a rise of over 20% since the first study, published in 2017.

This progress over the past three years backs up other research like the 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, which called out database development for the first time as key to high performance in DevOps. Leading organizations in the Redgate survey understand this, with 23% seeing traditional database practices increasing the risk of failed deployments, and 20% citing slow development and release cycles as major issues with non-DevOps approaches.

Showing the increased appetite for change, over half of organizations (52%) believe they can move to fully automated database DevOps within a year, a figure that rises to 83% for those that have already adopted DevOps across all their other projects.

However, a hardcore of organizations are failing to move forward with DevOps. 15% of those surveyed have no plans to introduce DevOps within the next two years, with 40% of these citing lack of awareness of the business benefits as the main obstacle to adoption. For those who have already embarked on their DevOps journey, the main challenge is disruption to existing workflows. Across all respondents, a lack of skills (22%) and disruption to business (21%) are highlighted as the largest obstacles to success.

The importance of meeting increasingly strict compliance requirements is also a key driver for database DevOps. 61% of organizations think it has a positive impact on meeting regulatory requirements, rising to 66% amongst those who have already adopted it.

Commenting on the findings, Mary Robbins, Redgate Product Marketing Manager, says: “Our third annual survey finds that DevOps adoption is maturing across many leading organizations, with developers, DBAs and other stakeholders working together and adopting common DevOps practices to drive business benefits. However, the picture is also becoming more nuanced – some organizations and sectors seem to be turning their back on the advantages of DevOps, affecting their competitiveness and productivity.”

This is disappointing because those organizations which are adopting DevOps are seeing the introduction of common practices across both application and database development. Version control is now used by 83% of respondents for application development, and 55% for database development, rising steadily from 81% and 53% respectively in 2018. And the use of continuous integration in development has increased even more, from 40% (application) and 21% (database) to 53% and 27%. This is leading to increased usage of third party tools across DevOps processes.

This closer collaboration between developers and DBAs is essential to successful DevOps, and the survey found that traditional barriers are continuing to break down. 62% of respondents said that collaboration between DBAs and developers was ‘Great’ or ‘Good’, rising to 76% amongst those that have adopted DevOps across all projects. 77% of organizations have developers responsible for both database and application development, although this varies by industry and company size, with larger businesses and those in financial services, healthcare and government more likely to have dedicated database developers.