The pace of software releases continues to get more frenetic, and we're getting close to the point where daily releases are almost commonplace. At the same time, IT shops aren't quite ready to turn the whole process over to automation.
That's the word from the latest survey[1] of 1,324 IT managers and professionals released by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which finds release cycles have continued to speed up. Surprisingly, however, the use of automation to manage these cycles has slipped significantly. The percentage of those who release software daily, or even multiple times a day, has increased to 29% from 27% last year, the survey's authors report. Weekly release cycles are still the most common (26%), but more than half of respondents (55%) release weekly or more frequently.
At the same time, the survey finds, there has been a shift away from fully automated cycles, which dropped to 33% from 40% in 2019. "This could mean that many organizations are not ready to jump to fully automated cycles because of the complexity of setting them up, or they wish to retain control over certain aspects of application deployment," the CNCF authors speculate.
It's not that IT professionals are going back to manual approaches -- that would be about as stressful as stressful gets, especially among the close to one-third doing daily releases. Twenty-seven percent conducted releases manually in 2018, a number that now stands at 15%. Rather, a hybrid, semi-automated approach is increasingly preferred -- rising from 25% two years ago to 46% today.
Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are also now commonplace, the survey shows. Eighty-two percent of respondents use CI/CD pipelines in production. The three most used CI/CD tools are Jenkins (53%), GitLab (36%), and GitHub Actions (20%).
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