ActiveState’s State of CI/CD Survey
We’re researching how ActiveState can help improve enterprise CI/CD tooling and practices. Take the State of Enterprise CI/CD Survey.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CI/CD) is an agile software development best practice designed to enable more frequent and reliable code changes. And if you’re building a commercial application, who wouldn’t want that? As a result, there are a large number of CI/CD vendors with various offerings vying for a place in the software development processes of organizations.
With so many vendors and solutions, no universal out-of-the-box approach exists. In fact, most enterprise implementations are a mix of proprietary tools, open source, and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software that provide for one or more of the following CI/CD processes:
- Automated build
- Automated unit tests
- Automated acceptance tests
- Automated performance tests
- Automated security tests
- Automated provisioning and deployment to testing environments
- Automated deployment to production
Additionally, most organizations have a long way to go before they’ve fully automated all CI/CD processes as many surveys (such as this one from devops.com) show.
ActiveState CI/CD Research
Here at ActiveState, we’re researching how our multi-language, multi-platform open source language automation platform (the ActiveState Platform) can help improve enterprise CI/CD tooling and practices. With a 20 year history of open source language support for organizations both large and small, we’ve seen some common pitfalls that may be negatively impacting CI/CD implementations, including:
- Reproducibility — with more frequent code check-ins and deployments, any inconsistencies between dev, test and production environments can introduce major stumbling blocks.
- Transparency — security and compliance issues that arise from a lack of provenance around open source language artifacts can also hold up the CI/CD chain.
We’ve done some preliminary polling (100 respondents) that seems to be back up these assertions, namely:
- 30% of those polled said one of their major challenges is bugs and errors that cropped up due to differences between development, testing/staging and production language runtimes.
- 40% of those polled indicated that automating security management for languages and dependencies remains a major challenge.
Join the CI/CD Survey
Now we’re expanding our efforts by launching the State of Enterprise CI/CD Survey, and we need your help. How does your enterprise’s practice of CI/CD compare to other enterprise’s CI/CD practice? And, more importantly, how can you improve your practices?
Once we’ve analyzed the results of the survey, we’ll be sending a copy to all participants to give you insight into how your processes compare to others, and help identify best practices you may be missing.
Take the State of Enterprise CI/CD Survey.
