A survey of 413 infrastructure decision-makers and influencers published today finds nearly half (45%) believe their organization has achieved a high level of infrastructure automation.
Conducted by the market research firm Panterra on behalf of Spacelift, a provider of an IT automation platform, the survey also finds that half of respondents (50%) are part of IT teams that require a week or more to deploy infrastructure changes in production, and 43% need to rerun their infrastructure deployments more than four times to get it right.
Overall, 45% of respondents claim to have streamlined workflows and reduced friction, with 32% having reduced infrastructure costs.
A total of 41% have also reduced security incidents, while 36% report incurring fewer compliance violations.
Spacelift CEO Pawel Hytry said that the survey makes it clear that while usage of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is widespread, the level of automation being achieved by most organizations is limited.
In fact, only 14% of respondents have fully implemented infrastructure automation best practices, and only 7% have embraced platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale. Those organizations are four times more likely to provision new resources in four hours or less, and five times more likely to deploy changes in production daily or multiple times a day, according to the report.
In general, the survey shows that when it comes to IT automation there is a paradox between speed and control. While IaC tools enable organizations to provision IT infrastructure faster, an absence of best practices results in more mistakes being made that ultimately conspire to slow DevOps teams down, said Hytry.
The more complex the IT environment becomes the more problematic these issues become, he added. For example, 81% of the survey respondents work for organizations that are managing hybrid cloud computing environments.
Given the fact there is still plenty of room for IT infrastructure automation improvement, DevOps teams should revisit how IaC tools are being used. Many of the processes being employed by application developers are far more manual than they should be, which creates more opportunities for misconfigurations, said Hytry. As a result, application developers are spending time on a set of tasks that in addition to possibly introducing cybersecurity risks also takes time away from writing code, he noted.
Hopefully, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will soon make it easier to discover these issues and surface suggestions for remediation. In the meantime, however, DevOps teams would be well advised to invest more in automation to ensure infrastructure is not only being provisioned faster but also more reliably, said Hytry.
Regardless of motivation, the pace at which code is now being developed in the age of AI has greatly accelerated. It’s only a matter of time before the number of times production environments will need to be provisioned and updated will exponentially increase. By the same token, DevOps teams that don’t fully automate those processes will continue to find themselves falling increasingly behind, as the amount of software being deployed inevitably overwhelms existing processes and workflows.
