2021 State of DevOps Report

[even the people in the report are peeking at my IPA :-]

2021 State of DevOps Report is the 10th edition of this super insightful annual report. Each year, thousands of people share their experience in applying DevOps principles while authors crunch the data and serve us valuable insights. Last year I discussed the report with Alanna Brown who started the report in the first place. Alanna is one of the kindest people I met – you should listen to our conversation and see for yourself!

This edition is a special one: apart from revealing the trends, it nicely summarizes what happened in the last 10 years and gives us a glimpse into the future.

I opened a bottle of nice IPA the other evening, wanting just to take a look at the report. In the end, I read the whole thing in one piece, nodding to myself almost all the time.

Huge thanks to main authors Nigel Kersten, Kate McCarthy, and Michael Stahnke, as well as all additional contributors.

Here are some of the highlights – for the full experience I encourage you to read the report.

I like how the report starts, with a clear message that DevOps is fundamentally a human-centered movement.

I like this so much because too many times new conversations about DevOps steer toward Jenkins and Kubernetes… damn if it was that easy, most of us wouldn’t have a job today.

It was a perfect storm! Alanna talked about this in our conversation – how she met dr. Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble, and how their collaboration launched the report on a whole another level.

This is so true and in line with what we all see in the field. In large organizations, there are pockets of success but generally, organizations have a hard time rolling the success out across all teams and lines of business.

PSA: In the interest of full disclosure, this is where I ran out of IPA(!) and had to switch to my wife’s gin tonic. IMHO, this didn’t deteriorate my reading capabilities, she made a light one.

Let this one sink in… Transformation happens in the trenches but needs to be fully supported from the top. Neither can leadership execute the changes nor can teams authorize themselves.

Again, I feel seen. We refuse to put “DevOps” in the role name and rather opt for “automation engineer”. That led us to people with automation degrees applying for the job, expecting it has something to do with manufacturing and conveyor belts.

As I said, I’m personally against it and I will die on that hill 🙂

Team Topologies FTW! It is such a useful approach to structuring and organizing your teams that you must give it a chance. Read all about our experience with Team Topologies and how we built a successful platform team.

Courtney led several large-scale organizations and knows how it is done: we need to make “right” easy to do. Hence guardrails and mechanisms for feedback.

YES YES!!1! We always focus on automation because it’s easier than dealing with messy organization, people, relationships, interactions, politics, incentives, mindsets, what-is-value questions.

I use cloud therefore I must be good at DevOps, right?

Hard no! 😊

What about Dev(Sec)Ops?

I’m on A-team. But I hear you B-team! Just like John Willis once said, paraphrased: if that’s what is needed for this industry to start thinking about security then I’ll go along with it!

This seems easy but it’s hard 🙁

I like 2021 edition a lot! I see I’ll be citing this a lot for the next 360sh days.

People take a look at the report!