March 2021 Summaries

The analysis of 453 engineering teams by Humanitec provides insights into their DevOps setup, tooling, and performance metrics. Most teams use public cloud and Kubernetes, with a majority (48.4%) entirely on public cloud. Continuous Integration is dominated by Jenkins, while AWS Codepipeline, Github Actions, and CircleCI are gaining popularity. The distribution of programming languages confirms the dominance of JavaScript. The architectural setup shows a preference for loosely coupled architectures, with 34.6% running monolithic applications. Containers are widely adopted, with 81.1% on either technology or migrating to it. Application configurations are mostly stored in version control systems, while infrastructure configs use infrastructure as code methodology. The approach to DevOps reveals gaps in self-service and task management, with many teams relying on senior developers for DevOps tasks. Performance metrics show promising results, with 35.1% of teams deploying on-demand, 14.6% several times per day, and 34.7% recovering from failures within an hour. The analysis highlights the convergence towards "gold-standards" in infrastructure, architecture, and KPIs, as well as significant gaps in cultural setup.

GitOps is an approach that takes familiar tools like Git and Continuous Delivery pipelines to automate infrastructure, providing a vendor-neutral, clear history of changes, and the ability to reproduce or roll back deployments. The underlying Git protocol is open source, lightweight, and usable on various platforms. It uses familiar tools and processes, bringing developers and operations teams closer together by allowing developers to get on with their work while operations focus on quality service work. However, GitOps has its limitations, including not addressing bad practices, proliferating repositories, lacking help for secrets management, and being hard to audit as applications scale. To determine if GitOps is right for you, consider resolving development and operations teams' responsibilities and interactions, scaling GitOps with a strategy that encompasses the needs of multiple teams and applications, or considering an Internal Developer Platform that addresses these concerns.

Aiven, a cloud data platform provider, has entered into a technical alliance with Humanitec, the market leader for Internal Developer Platforms. This partnership aims to standardize 95% of all public cloud infrastructure into one unified developer experience layer, allowing developers to seamlessly deploy applications between cloud providers without knowledge of the underlying infrastructure. The integration will simplify daily developer workflows and maintenance, enabling operations teams to focus on features rather than vendor-specific quirks. By combining Aiven's managed open source database services with Humanitec's application layer technologies, the partnership provides a customized solution for developers, reducing maintenance overhead and increasing productivity for both development and operations teams.