Today's software development shops have become a frenzy of activity, churning out releases at a faster pace than ever -- with a majority now delivering releases weekly or even faster. While such a pace would burn out everyone involved if conducted manually, we're not quite there yet with automating development, delivery and deployment cycles.
That's the word from a recent survey[1] of 1,337 managers and practitioners conducted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation[2], which also finds native cloud adoption -- with ancillary approaches such as containers, serverless and service mesh -- on the rise.
Those respondents with daily release cycles increased from 15% in 2018 to 27%, and weekly release cycles increased from 20% to 28%. Hybrid models in 2019 are up to 41% compared to 25% in 2018. This can be attributed to a rise in available CI/CD tools, the most popular being Jenkins (58%), followed by GitLab (34%), and CircleCI (13%). The survey's authors credit the rise of DevOps, CI/CD tools, and agile methodologies with this accelerated pace.
Surprisingly, however, there has not been an increase in full-on release automation. The survey found little change in the percentage of developers automating their releases, remaining in the 40% range for both 2018 and 2019. "Where we see a change is in those using a hybrid approach versus fully manual releases. Hybrid approaches, using a combination of manual and automated tools, up to 41% in 2019 compared to 25% last year," they state. "Doing releases manually has dropped to 14% from 27%."
Cloud computing in its current form has been around for some time now -- at least 14 years, since the launch of Amazon Web Services, and the actual coining[3] of the term in 2006.