The History of DevOps Reports

The 2023 State of DevOps report explored the growing impact of Platform Engineering. An overwhelming 93% of survey respondents reported that Platform Engineering is a “step in the right direction,” but we wanted to dive in further to this unique and evolving trend.  

The 2023 report included insights like:  

• What makes platform engineering the key to DevOps success at scale
• Why platform engineering is on the rise  
• How platform engineering benefits the entire organization – when done well  
• The effect of under-investing in product management skills on platform teams

Platform engineering can enable benefits that stretch across an organization. Don’t miss the 2023 report to better understand how DevOps works alongside, not against, platform engineering to deliver results.  

DOWNLOAD THE 2023 REPORT

The 2021 DevOps Salary Report is intended to help practitioners and hiring managers get a high-level grasp on the latest salary trends in the global DevOps industry.

Key findings from this year’s report include:

• While the US remains the leader when it comes to paying the highest salaries, this trend may be changing.
• More women are entering the highest income brackets across roles, industries, and regions.
• The salary gap between male and female practitioners is closing within the higher income brackets.
• Companies at a high level of DevOps evolution continue to compensate their employees at the highest level, with practitioner salaries doubling and manager salaries nearly tripling from 2020 to 2021.
• More software developers/engineers and DevOps engineers are in the higher income brackets in 2021 than in 2020 and 2019.
• For the first time, practitioners in consulting roles notably had the highest percentage of those earning more than $125,000.

Read the free report to find out how your salary compares to your peers by region, role, gender, company revenue, and more.

Get the 2021 Salary Report

Download the report to learn:

• What keeps teams stuck in the middle of their DevOps evolution
• Whether automation and cloud translate to DevOps success
• Why top-down enablement of bottom-up transformation is crucial
• The importance of team identities and clear interaction paradigms
• How a platform team can scale the benefits of DevOps practices
• The way highly successful DevOps firms approach security

Get the 2021 Report

This year, we also looked at how salaries vary according to a company’s level of DevOps practice or evolution. It’s no surprise that survey respondents working at companies with well-developed DevOps practices also report higher salaries. To attract the aforementioned highly skilled, adaptable people who can execute on digital innovation, many companies actively publicize their DevOps values and cultures.

Key findings from this year’s DevOps Salary Report include:

• Companies at a high level of DevOps evolution compensate their employees at the highest level, with managers making more than practitioners.
• Salaries rose worldwide in 2020, most steeply for upper-income respondents in Japan and the United Kingdom.
• Employees working in life sciences, pharmaceuticals and healthcare were the top earners worldwide, while in most years, financial services and technology lead the pack.
• Technology workers in the United States make more money than anywhere else in the world.
• More women than men earn mid-range salaries, but more men than women earn top salaries.
• Companies with the highest revenue generally pay the most.
• The best-paid job title amongst practitioners was platform engineer.
• Engineering managers earn more than IT managers or information security managers, by a wide margin.

Access the 2020 Salary Report

Download this year’s report to learn:

• How an internal platform can help you scale DevOps practices
• The importance of having a product mindset as you build your platform
• How self-service capabilities evolve as DevOps practices evolve
• Four approaches to change management based on approval processes, automated testing and deployment and risk mitigation techniques
• How to achieve more effective and efficient change management
• Top challenges to automating the change management process

Access the 2020 Report

On some level, we all know that integrating security into the software delivery lifecycle is important. But does it improve business outcomes? And how do successful organizations fully integrate security?

Thanks to the nearly 3,000 people who took the 2019 State of DevOps survey, we have answers.

In the 2019 State of DevOps Report, you’ll learn:

• Which DevOps practices are most important for improving your security posture.
• How security integration affects everything from your ability to deploy on demand to the time it takes to remediate vulnerabilities.
• What to expect as you integrate security into the software delivery lifecycle. (Hint: It’s not all sunshine and rainbows.)

Access the 2019 Report

Thanks to Michael Stahnke of CircleCI and Andi Mann of Splunk for authoring the report with us, and to Anitian, F5 and ServiceNow for sponsoring it.

The State of DevOps Report is the longest standing, most widely referenced and largest body of DevOps research on the planet.

The 2018 report provides prescriptive guidance to help you get to the next stage in your evolution, no matter where you’re at today. We’ve analyzed responses from over 3,000 technical professionals from around the world to reveal the five stages of DevOps evolution. We already know why DevOps matters. The 2018 State of DevOps Report provides the “how” to help you get started or unstuck, and scale DevOps success across your business.

In the 2018 State of DevOps Report, you’ll learn:

• What stage you’re in on your DevOps journey — from building the foundation to providing self-service capabilities
• How you can get to the next stage faster and more effectively
• Which practices are mission-critical to reaching the highest levels of DevOps evolution

Access the 2018 Report

Thanks to Andi Mann from Splunk for authoring the 2018 State of DevOps Report with us, and to AWS, Cloudability, Cognizant, CyberArk, Diaxion, Eficode and Splunk for sponsoring it.

Over the past six years and more than 27,000 State of DevOps survey responses, we’ve found clear evidence that DevOps practices yield remarkable results for IT teams and organizations.

This year we also discovered new findings about transformational leadership, automation practices, continuous delivery, lean product management, and DevOps in not-for-profits and organizations that use off-the-shelf software.

Here are a few things you’ll learn in this year’s report:

• How DevOps practices affect deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate and MTTR
• The influence leadership has on DevOps transformations
• How high- and low-performing teams automate differently
• The impact of architecture and team structure on IT performance
• How DevOps helps organizations reach both their financial and non-financial goals

Access the 2017 Report

Thank you to the 2017 State of DevOps Report authors Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Alanna Brown and Nigel Kersten and sponsors Amazon Web Services, Atlassian, Deloitte, Electric Cloud, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Splunk, and Wavefront.

Over the last five years, we’ve surveyed more than 25,000 technical professionals worldwide to better understand how DevOps practices impact IT and organizational performance.

We’ve looked closely at lean management practices, application architecture, the role of IT managers in a DevOps transformation, diversity, deployment pain and burnout.

And we’ve confirmed that there’s a lot more to IT performance than technical practices; organizations need to invest just as much in their people as they do in their technology.

This year, we look at the role of experimentation, how to integrate security into DevOps, the ROI of DevOps and more.

Key findings:

• High-performing organizations decisively outperform their lower-performing peers. They deploy 200 times more frequently, with 2,555 times faster lead times, recover 24 times faster, and have three times lower change failure rates.
• High performers have better employee loyalty, as measured by employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS).
• High-performing organizations spend 22 percent less time on unplanned work and rework. They are able to spend 29 percent more time on new work, such as new features or code.
• Taking an experimental approach to product development can improve performance.
• Undertaking a technology transformation initiative can produce sizeable returns for any organization.Using key metrics, we’ve provided formulas to help you quantify potential cost savings.

Access the 2016 Report

Embrace DevOps, or get left behind.

Over the past four years, the Puppet Labs State of DevOps Report has shed more light on DevOps, IT performance and organizational performance than any other research of its kind — based on responses from over 20,000 tech professionals worldwide.

Findings from the 2015 State of DevOps Report:

• High-performing IT organizations experience 60X fewer failures and recover from failure 168X faster than their lower-performing peers. They also deploy 30X more frequently with 200X shorter lead times.
• Lean management and continuous delivery practices create the conditions for delivering value faster, sustainably.
• High performance is achievable no matter if your apps are greenfield, brownfield or legacy.
• DevOps initiatives launched solely by C-level executives or from the grassroots are less likely to succeed.
• IT managers play a critical role in promoting diversity and limiting burnout.

Access the 2015 Report

Better IT = Better Business

The third annual DevOps survey by Puppet Labs, IT Revolution Press and ThoughtWorks garnered more than 9,200 responses from technical professionals around the world, making this the largest and most comprehensive DevOps survey to date.

Key Findings:

• Companies with high-performing IT organizations are twice as likely to exceed their profitability, market share and productivity goals.
• IT performance improves with DevOps maturity, and strongly correlates with well-known DevOps practices.
• Culture matters. The cultural practices of DevOps are predictive of organizational performance.
• Job satisfaction is the No. 1 predictor of performance against organizational goals.

Access the 2014 Report

Key Findings:

• DevOps adoption is accelerating. Sixty-three percent of respondents have implemented DevOps practices, compared to 50 percent in 2011—a 26 percent increase in DevOps adoption rate.
• DevOps offers increased agility and reliability. Respondents from organizations that had implemented DevOps reported benefits in staggering numbers: More frequent software releases and improved software deployment quality were both reported by 63 percent. Beyond directly reporting benefits, these respondents were five times more likely to be part of a high-performing organization.
• High-performing organizations enabled by DevOps deploy code 30 times more frequently than their peers. These organizations are deploying several times a day instead of once a month, and completing those deployments 8,000 times faster.
• High-performing organizations enabled by DevOps have 50 percent fewer failures. Respondents from these organizations reported double the change success rate of their peers, and reported restoring service 12 times faster.
• Demand for DevOps skills continues to grow. Job listings for "DevOps" are up by 75 percent, and those hiring for DevOps positions are primarily looking for coding/scripting abilities and people skills.

Access the 2013 Report