Increasingly, that model is cloud-based. Significant numbers of businesses now develop and test their apps in the cloud
Develop and Deploy Applications Your Platform for speed and flexibility.
Insights from an independent global survey of 730 senior IT professionals demonstrating that the cloud is critical to organizations being competitive.
Introduction: Cutting Time to Market
Introduction: Cutting Time to Market Organizations recognize the imperative to develop and deploy better applications: it is the key to accelerating business processes and differentiating services for customers. The problem, however, is that application development, deployment, and operations aren’t core competencies for most organizations—they’re a means to an end for which they must find the most effective operating model. Increasingly, that model is cloud-based. Significant numbers of businesses now develop and test their apps in the cloud before deploying the finished products back in the business. Others are now going beyond DevTest to running production in the cloud, migrating their applications to the cloud, or even developing them from scratch there. Developers work together with their colleagues throughout the business to take a DevOps approach to application delivery.
Survey analysis by Longitude Research suggests that many organizations are clear on the priority features of their application development tools and capabilities. Close to half (43 percent) are looking for multi-platform capabilities from tools—potentially spanning both cloud and on-premises—while almost as many (41 percent) pick automation capabilities that can accelerate development and deployment.
Significant numbers of businesses now develop and test their apps in the cloud before deploying the finished products back in the business. Overall, the research paints a picture of greater demand for freedom, diversity, speed, and flexibility, enabling developers to switch between different platforms, runtimes, and languages. Many of the features respondents call for—open databases (38 percent), APIs and microservices (36 percent), and open languages (27 percent)—echo this perspective.
What features are most important to you regarding application development tools?
43% 41% 38% 36%
Multiplatform capabilities
Automation capabilities
Open databases
APIs and microservices
29% 29% 27% 22% 21%
Visual tools
Al/machine learning capabilities
Open languages
Containers
Chatbot capabilities
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The DevOps Journey
The DevOps Journey Those organizations that have begun developing and testing applications in the cloud report a positive impact on their businesses. More than 60 percent of respondents to the survey report that the move has increased innovation levels at their enterprises, and more than half have seen their competitiveness improve. Respondents also report marked improvements in code-release speed, channel deployment, and development speed. In addition, says Paul Van Hout, CEO and founder of Pragmatyxs, development in the cloud has helped instill greater discipline in the company’s application management overall. “We have to think a lot about change control and automated testing. When you’re on premises, the delays and bureaucracy give you almost no wiggle-room in terms of efficiency,” he explains. “Deploying to the cloud has forced us to be more disciplined in deciding how to streamline, how to automate and improve testing, and how to communicate changes in our service to customers.” The breadth and depth of these gains underline the role cloud can play in delivering improvements in application development, deployment, and operations that benefit the organization strategically. And it is noticeable that the greater the cloud maturity of the organization, the more likely it is to report these gains and benefits. In fact, in every area surveyed, cloud-mature companies significantly outperform the rest of the sample, and those companies using more cloud services and applications in general are securing greater benefits from developing in the cloud. For example, 71 percent of cloud-mature organizations say their development speed accelerated following cloud app development—against 47 percent of less-mature enterprises. One likely explanation for this correlation is the advantage that cloud solutions offer in terms of simplifying and automating the organization’s IT operations; on-premises development, by contrast, may struggle in the face of diverse technologies and IT operational inefficiencies.
*All the respondents in the sample who were qualified to answer this question.
Cloud development impact (total*)
7% 7% 7%
8% 8% 8%
50% 50% 50%
42% 42% 42%
54% 54% 54%
Release code speed Release Release code code speed speed
Channel deployment Channel Channel deployment deployment
16% 16% 16%
7% 7% 7%
51% 51% 51%
42% 42% 42%
37% 37% 37%
5% 5% 5%
33% 33% 33%
Innovativeness Innovativeness Innovativeness
47% 47% 47%
Development reliance Development Development reliance reliance
Development speed Development Development speed speed
62% 62% 62%
38% 38% 38%
7% 7% 7%
56% 56% 56%
37% 37% 37%
Competitiveness Competitiveness Competitiveness
Worsened
Little/no impact
Improved
Worsened
Little/no impact
Improved
Worsened Improved Little/no impact Please rate the extent to which you think developing applications in the cloud has impacted/will impact your business. Respondents selected their answer on a seven-point scale.
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The DevOps Journey
Cloud development impact (cloud exposure*)
43%
78%
71%
69%
68%
53%
47%
74% 60%
50%
50%
27%
Release code
Deployment across all channels
Development speed
High cloud exposure
High cloud exposure
Headcount/ developer resourced
Innovative
Competitive with other companies
Lower cloud exposure
Lower cloud exposure
Please rate the extent to which you think developing applications in the cloud has impacted/will impact your business.Chart above shows improvement. Respondents selected their answer on a seven-point scale.
Equally, the gap between those with fully executed cloud strategies and those that have only somewhat developed cloud strategies is sizeable. Cloud maturity secures benefits, but to get the greatest gains organizations need a clear, overarching strategy for DevOps. Almost two-thirds of enterprises with a fully executed cloud strategy (65 percent) report innovation gains, for example, compared with 51 percent of their peers with a less-developed strategy.
Figure 9: Please rate the extent to which you think developing applications in the cloud has impacted/will impact your business (global and ‘high-exposure’)
*The proportion of respondent organizations’ applications that are currently in the cloud — their “cloud exposure.” High: Where 70 percent or more of their applications are either cloud native or have already been migrated. This is the cloud-mature group. Lower: Organizations with less than 40 percent of their applications in the cloud.
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The Current State of Play
The Current State of Play While organizations are increasingly attracted to the benefits of developing and testing in the cloud, their current levels of performance in key areas of development suggest substantial further gains are possible for those that fully embrace DevOps—where application developers collaborate with operational personnel to design, test, and improve applications.
teams are somewhere between centralized and distributed, while 55 percent say systems management lies somewhere between satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Improving performance in this area remains a work in progress: just under a third of organizations describe their application design as API-first (32 percent), 31 percent use distributed development teams and 33 percent have a microservice-based architecture.
In each of the development areas in the research, the majority of organizations classify themselves as occupying the middle ground. For example, 61 percent say their development
The improvement process in these areas has begun: only a minority of organizations consider themselves to be lagging significantly on development areas. But it is clear that the best performance comes from cloud-mature firms. For example, 61 percent of such businesses believe their DevOp teams are integrated, versus 38 percent of less-mature organizations. Cloud-mature firms also release code significantly faster than those with less exposure to the cloud—courtesy of always-on computing, rapid provisioning, and DevOps support.
Organization performance in development areas (total) Unsatisfactory
2%
System management is:
Manual and discrete
43%
Continuous delivery is:
4%
Automated/integrated
64% Segregated
2%
DevOps teams are:
42%
Application design is:
API first
6%
62% Standard single channel
Interface is:
63% Architechture is:
64% Development teams are:
8%
33% Distributed
61% Hard-coded
33% Microservice
3% Centralized
32% Custom multichannel
4% Monolithic
33% Integrated
56% Functionality first
3%
Satisfactory
55%
Software coding is:
31% Dynamic assembly
61%
36%
When it comes to software and feature development, how would you characterize your organization regarding each of these DevOps areas? Respondents selected their answer on a seven-point scale.
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Overcoming the Skills Hurdle
Overcoming the Skills Hurdle What stands in the way of organizations seeking to move toward greater DevOps maturity? The research suggests that a lack of resources is one important issue to address, with 32 percent of respondents citing a lack of in-house skills as a barrier. Increased susceptibility to cyberattacks also worries them (32 percent), and operational issues are another factor, with 29 percent pointing to the dependence on IT to approve developers’ access. However, these issues are not insurmountable. For example, there are tools that help to boost security. Many firms are skeptical about having code in production, but as long as security is addressed ahead of implementation, companies can realize deployment benefits without exposing themselves to new threats. Ongoing monitoring via metrics, logs, and topological flow maps will also help. Reliance on developers is a key issue for many organizations, with a skills gap across the industry meaning that those companies that do have developers in house are overreliant on them. Organizations may need to be more creative about growing their developer expertise: microservices, APIs, and DevOps for building cloud-native applications demand new skills. For businesses concerned about the cost of recruitment, reskilling through training and certification is a viable alternative. On the other hand, 37 percent of organizations say that development in the cloud has reduced their dependence on developers. There are good reasons for this. The trend toward cloud-based DevOps enables organizations to focus specifically on the additional capabilities and innovation they require through an open resource. Lower costs in the cloud free up resources, while automation and acceleration gains give developers more time to focus on value-added activities. This is important because developers need time to keep up with the skills required as innovation and technology evolve.
In this sense, DevOps in the cloud is giving the most mature organizations the opportunity to compress the innovation gap. PaaS tools enable them to acquire capabilities they would otherwise have had to develop for themselves.
Integration unlocks greater potential. There will be other challenges, however. Enterprises that attempt to build out complex integrations in the cloud just as they were on premises risk encountering some familiar problems. A multi-vendor environment may present even greater challenges for integration. Rather than undertake complex integration, companies should therefore look for cloud vendors that offer pre-integrated solutions and adapters. By exposing a set of APIs for their applications, companies can connect easily to any number of other cloud capabilities, on-premises applications and data sources, and SaaS applications. Moving to an API-first approach will require buy-in from the entire organization, with collaboration between both front-end and back-end developers, and agreement about how APIs will be built within the organization. Meanwhile, DevOps and development teams need to be distributed and integrated, and this may create cultural challenges: each development area has its own resource, skills and focus demands. Ultimately, DevOps requires a different mindset from the past, with a much less fixed view of development and deployment. With apps invariably written in open-source languages, organizations need a platform that offers choice and flexibility. Not all cloud propositions deliver this. Not all are able to give enterprises the orchestration, automation and other capabilities necessary for them to focus on writing code regardless of the language they are using. Businesses must therefore choose their cloud providers carefully. They should be able to build modern, cloud-native apps; develop microservices-based cloud-native apps; and move apps from the data center to the public cloud and back again with automated migration tools. In addition, they should have visibility of both their own cloud environment and thirdparty environments.
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Conclusion: Unified in the Cloud
Conclusion: Unified in the Cloud Increasing numbers of businesses recognize the way cloud benefits the development and deployment of software. More and more are developing and testing their apps in the cloud, and others are going further—moving beyond the DevTest approach to embrace DevOps, whereby their app development and operations are unified in the cloud. The survey finds these businesses reaping an array of benefits: increased innovation, greater competitiveness, and improved agility—they’re releasing code and deploying across more channels. Developing in the cloud has also led to a more rigorous, more disciplined approach to managing their applications. They are leaving the less-cloud-mature companies behind. The less-mature companies are struggling to overcome a daunting range of challenges, with the skills gap one of the most pressing. Counterintuitively, however, the cloud, platform as a service, and DevOps can help firms open the door to external capabilities while freeing up their existing workforce to concentrate on higher-value tasks. For those organizations that are ahead of the game in cloud adoption, the improvement in skills could be exponential. Seeking speed, agility, and transparency, organizations are turning to DevOps, and they want to be able to switch languages and platforms at will. They will turn to the cloud platforms that are as flexible as they are.
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