A survey of 855 IT decision-makers conducted by The Futurum Group finds artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being viewed as playing a critical role in the development and deployment of software.
In total, the survey finds that 41% of respondents expect generative AI tools and platforms will be used to generate, review and test code, while 39% plan to make use of AI models based on machine learning algorithms.
More than a third plan (35%) also plan to apply AI and other forms of automation to IT operations, the survey finds.
Other priorities include software supply chain security (32%), cloud-native microservices and containers (26%) and modernizing their data infrastructure (24%).
Over the next 12-18 months, organizations specifically plan to significantly increase software security spend on application programming interfaces (42%), DevOps toolchains (35%) incident response (34%) open source software (32%), software bill of materials (30%) and software composition analysis (27%) tools.
Overall, the survey finds that 71% of organizations in the advanced stages of DevOps are either standardizing its rollout across the organization (44%) or have a high competence or mastery of DevOps (26%). A full 93% claim to have adopted platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale.
Additionally, 61% of respondents report they are using Kubernetes clusters to run some (41%) or most (19%) of their production workloads. The top workloads deployed on Kubernetes are AI/ML/Generative AI (56%) and data-intensive workloads such as analytics, tied at 56% each, closely followed by databases (54%), modernized legacy applications (48%), and microservices-based applications (45%).
This report comes on the heels of a separate Futurum market research report that projects the overall size of the DevOps and application development market will reach $268.73 billion by 2028, representing a 9.76% compound annual growth rate.
That report also suggests the rate at which DevOps teams are shifting to cloud platforms is only going to accelerate, with DevOps and software development tools and platforms projected to reach $218.21 billion by 2028.
Mitch Ashley, vice president and practice lead for DevOps and application development for The Futurum Group, said the four main drivers of those investments are the need to increase the velocity at which software is developed and deployed, the rise of AI, an ongoing transition to cloud-native applications and a need to better secure software supply chains.
In general, it’s apparent that DevOps as a practice for building and deploying software continues to gain momentum even in uncertain economic times. As the race to build and deploy AI applications continues the need to build and deploy applications faster has arguably never been more crucial. Most of those AI applications will eventually be deployed on Kubernetes clusters that most organizations already rely on to deploy their most modern applications.
The challenge, as always, is finding the best way to achieve that goal in a way that application developers will embrace rather than resist. After all, if application developers don’t appreciate the experience, the best and brightest will inevitably start looking for alternative employment that better suits the way they, rather than the organization, prefer to work. At the same time, however, there is always going to be a need to achieve some level of standardization that keeps application development costs from spiraling out of control so ultimately DevOps success requires the striking of the most delicate of balances.
