Overview: 2022 Accelerate State Of DevOps Report Findings
An overview into the tools and practices used by organizations to improve devops from this year’s State of DevOps report.
Overview
Every year Google surveys professionals from around the world giving vital information on what practices and capabilities are needed to attain high performance within a limited span. This year the team primarily focused on software supply chain security and the practices around it. The State of DevOps Report also highlights how high-trust, low-blame culture can increase productivity and security more than a low-trust, high-blame culture.
The five crucial characteristics of cloud computing
The report states that these 5 characteristics are crucial to software delivery and operation performance. There is a 14% increase in resource pooling which is the largest percentage increase among all 5 characteristics.
On-demand self-service – The user of the cloud provider should be able to get services, computing resources, storage, virtual machines etc on demand with the need of human intervention
Broad network access – It is the ability of the network infrastructure to connect different clients (mobiles, tabs, laptops etc) smoothly
Resource pooling – Using a multi tenant approach, the provider pools its computing resources to serve a number of customers where resources are dynamically assigned according to the customer demand
Rapid elasticity – The resources available to the user can be elastically provisioned and released (when it’s no longer needed) to scale up or down according to the current demand
Measured service – A metering capability is used to automatically control and optimize the resource usage at different service level. We get transparency of resource usage by monitoring, controlling and reporting.
Role of reliability in performance
Firmly established reliability brings a positive impact on the success of a business. The report states that without reliability, frequent feature releases are of no use as they won’t benefit the end user. The report also talks about site reliability engineering and how it benefits infrastructure and operational efficiency. With continuous integration and testing SRE reduces service downtime and ensure availability of most of the services. Originated from google SRE is practised in a lot of organisations.
Majorly used SLSA practices
The report also surveyed the practices adopted by organizations to identify and resolve security vulnerabilities. Centralized CI/CD platform was the most commonly answered practice with 63% of votes. Following this were preservation of code history (60%), builds defined using scripts (58%), keeping builds isolated (57%) and build environment and configuration variables stored in text files kept in a version control system (56%). Two person review process and metadata signing were on the lower end of the responses
Wrapping Up
This report aims to present a rigorous assessment of how practices and capabilities result in business-critical outcomes like organizational performance. It assesses the reproducibility of numerous effects from past reports and broadens the focus to take into account the new DevOps goals.
This year, redesigning of the survey, the analyses, and statistical modeling strategy was done to examine the conditionality or dependencies of specific effects. The environment of software delivery and operational performance was also described in novel ways. For more, you can download the report yourself.