DevOps.com & Perforce Surveyed 450+ People
Perforce partnered with DevOps.com in late 2018 to understand how version control enables large-scale DevOps.
More than 450 people responded to the survey. And the respondents were a great cross-section of practitioners in the DevOps community. It included DevOps engineers, software developers, IT/software architects, and IT leaders. The collection of responses gives us a good perspective into the DevOps challenges that teams face at large enterprise.
It is clear from the responses in this survey that version control can address a number of DevOps challenges that enterprises encounter when they try to achieve DevOps at scale.
Read the Full Report to Learn:
- Your peers’ version control best practices.
- How your peers overcome challenges.
- The DevOps best practices your peers use.
- How to achieve higher-quality development.
- How to achieve faster time to market.
Or keep reading for a quick preview.
Version Control Tools in DevOps & Why They're Key
Every year since 2014, DORA (the DevOps Research and Assessment group) has called out the effective use of version control as a consistent predictor of performance among top teams.
But your VCS affects more than performance.
Turns out, there’s also a correlation between achieving DevOps and effectively implementing version control best practices.
The 5 Biggest Challenges for Version Control DevOps
The biggest DevOps challenges are:
- Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery.
- Non-optimal developer productivity.
- Distributed teams.
- Managing build artifacts.
- Scalability.
Keep reading for a more in-depth look at the biggest challenges and how they relate to version control.
1. Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery
When teams invest thousands of dollars (or hundreds of thousands) into their software, it’s with the expectation that it will improve performance. And it should.
Yet even though 98.8% of respondents use a version control system, 63% of them named CI/CD performance as a problem with their current VCS.
Continuous Integration is key to DevOps. Achieving CI includes giving developers real-time feedback to improve quality. But it can cause bottlenecks on the VCS server. If your version control system isn’t fast and high performing, it won’t be able to keep up with this core aspect of CI.
2. Non-Optimal Developer Productivity
The most expensive issue with development is non-optimal developer productivity. But if you have developers sitting around waiting for builds, that’s exactly what you have.
According to the survey, there were 2 big things that slowed teams down:
- Testing.
- Waiting for code reviews.
Developers who sit around waiting for code reviews are a worst-case scenario. They’re waiting for feedback on their code. And if they start their next task and then get feedback, their productivity is negatively impacted by context-switching.
The right VCS combines speed and performance with built-in code review applications. This alleviates the stress of testing and waiting.
3. Distributed Teams
In today’s work environment, more and more people work remotely.
According to the survey, 71% are based in multinational locations or work remotely.
But even though the majority of respondents work on distributed teams, about half the respondents also said that developers complain about slow commits and merges.
The right VCS can intelligently distribute source code so all developers — regardless of their location — feel like they’re working on the same server. More importantly, they can always be confident that the work they’re checking out is the correct version.
4. Managing Build Artifacts
As software gets more complex, the size of assets also continues to increase. But even though production-grade assets are growing, DevOps teams struggle with managing those assets.
Only 28% of teams keep their production-grade assets in their VCS. While about 40% use an artifact manager.
Assuming your VCS is fast and secure, storing production-grade assets in your VCS is super convenient:
- It saves money. You don’t need additional licenses for an artifact manager.
- It improves security. Developers can go shopping for code in-house.
- It provides a source of truth. Source code and build artifacts are all in one place for a single source of truth.
- It streamlines DevOps. Testing tools only have one system to interface with.
5. Scalability
Git is a great resource for developers and small development teams. It’s free and widely popular.
But there’s a problem with Git. It was never designed to scale.
Now there are enterprise solutions that give developers the Git interface they’re familiar with. But they also get scalability, global replication, and high-performance for moving files and performing builds. These are key for achieving DevOps best practices. And these are things you can’t get from an open-source Git server.
Go Deeper. Get the Full Report PDF.
Read the report which covers the challenges and how to solve them with version control.
44% of DevOps Teams Will Replace Their VCS
Do you need a new version control system? Almost half of the respondents plan to replace their version control tool.
Why? Their current VCS is preventing them from achieving DevOps.
Companies can make dramatic improvements in their efficiency by improving what they get from their VCS. Teams who want to solve their challenges choose Helix Core — the fastest, most securable version control system.
Using Helix Core to Solve Enterprise Challenges
Helix Core enables world-class development at enterprise scale. Using Helix Core will help you:
- Achieve Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery via its integration with Jenkins and other tools.
- Improve productivity by integrating with testing and code review tools. (Helix Core comes with built-in code review.)
- Support distributed teams, who will be able to pull down code fast from remote servers.
- Manage build artifacts (alongside code repositories) for a single source of truth.
- Scale to 100s of 1,000s of users, petabytes of data, and more. (Helix Core even scales Git projects with Helix4Git.)
See for yourself how Helix Core will help your DevOps team. Try it free for up to 5 users and 20 workspaces.