Source: devops.com. Original report: Puppet “State of DevOps: Market Segmentation Report” (based on the 2017 State of DevOps survey).
DevOps Maturity Is Lower Than Many Assume
A market segmentation report published by Puppet, drawing on data from its 2017 “State of DevOps” survey of 3,200 IT professionals, paints a candid picture: DevOps maturity across most organizations is still relatively low. A majority of survey respondents reported that significant manual work remains in place across core disciplines — configuration management, deployment, testing, and change approval processes.
Alanna Brown, then Director of Product Marketing at Puppet, described the report’s central finding as a story of fragmented adoption. DevOps is being embraced tactically — to solve specific pain points within specific teams — rather than as a coordinated, organization-wide strategy. The practical consequence is that silos of DevOps practice are forming across the enterprise, and the next major challenge organizations will face is unifying those isolated pockets into a coherent whole.
Where DevOps Adoption Typically Begins
The survey identified the most common entry points into DevOps practice:
- Deployment automation
- Version control
- Continuous integration (CI)
- Infrastructure automation
These starting points reflect a preference for tooling-led adoption — changes that deliver measurable operational wins without requiring immediate cultural transformation. Less common starting points included lean practices, visualization of quality and productivity metrics, and implementing work-in-progress limits. These more systemic, process-oriented approaches tend to require broader organizational buy-in and are harder to demonstrate quickly.
Company Size Does Not Predict DevOps Maturity
One of the more counterintuitive findings Brown highlighted is that company size shows little correlation with DevOps maturity. Larger enterprises do not automatically outperform smaller organizations, and small companies are not reliably more agile in their DevOps adoption.
Instead, the report suggests that the primary driver of DevOps investment is customer demand pressure — organizations adopt mature DevOps practices when the speed and reliability of software delivery directly affects their ability to serve customers.
Industry sector, however, does appear to matter. The survey found that:
- Media, entertainment, and retail had the lowest proportion of low IT performers.
- Financial services, insurance, and manufacturing had the highest proportion of low performers.
This pattern likely reflects the competitive, consumer-facing pressure on media and retail companies to ship software fast, contrasted with the regulatory constraints and legacy infrastructure burdens that slow adoption in financial services and manufacturing.
Automation Frameworks Remain Underutilized
Consistent with the overall picture of DevOps immaturity, the report found that reliance on IT automation frameworks is not yet widespread. This matters because automation is widely regarded as a prerequisite for scaling DevOps beyond individual teams. Without it, organizations remain dependent on manual processes that are slow, error-prone, and difficult to audit.
DevOps Is Still Driven Bottom-Up
Brown noted that the report shows DevOps adoption continues to be driven primarily from the bottom of the organization upward — by engineers and team leads who recognize its value — rather than being championed by senior IT leaders from the outset. The typical pattern is that grassroots DevOps success becomes visible, and only then do organizations attempt to replicate it elsewhere.
At the same time, Brown was clear that the widespread presence of DevOps practices means it has moved well beyond a niche, grassroots movement. DevOps is now mainstream in the sense that most large IT organizations have some exposure to it — but mainstream presence is not the same as enterprise-wide maturity.
The Cultural and Technical Weight of Legacy Environments
A recurring theme in the report is the difficulty of adopting DevOps within traditional enterprise IT, as opposed to the web-scale companies where many of these practices were first developed. Organizations like Netflix, Amazon, and Google built their platforms without the burden of legacy applications, Waterfall development cycles, or ITIL-based change management. Traditional enterprises must operate DevOps processes alongside these older methodologies simultaneously — and not every application requires the same release cadence as a modern web service.
This creates a real tension: the organization must support a mixed-mode IT environment where some teams are deploying dozens of times per day and others are following quarterly release schedules governed by formal change advisory boards.
The Talent Gap Remains a Practical Constraint
Beyond culture and tooling, the report points to a straightforward operational problem: there are not enough people with DevOps skill sets to meet demand. As the number of applications that need to be built, tested, deployed, and maintained continues to grow, IT organizations are increasingly understaffed relative to that workload.
The broader strategic shift that Brown identified — more organizations recognizing that they are fundamentally software companies, regardless of what product or service they sell — is pushing DevOps higher on the priority list. That shift in identity tends to translate directly into investment in DevOps capability, both in tooling and in hiring.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
- Most enterprise organizations are still in early or mid-stage DevOps adoption, with significant manual work remaining in core processes.
- DevOps adoption typically starts with tooling (CI, version control, deployment automation) rather than cultural or process change.
- Company size is not a reliable predictor of DevOps maturity; customer-facing pressure and industry sector are stronger factors.
- Siloed DevOps adoption is common — unifying those silos into an enterprise-wide practice is the next frontier.
- Automation frameworks are underused, representing a significant opportunity for organizations looking to scale.
- The DevOps talent shortage is a real constraint that compounds the difficulty of the journey.
This article is based on the Puppet “State of DevOps: Market Segmentation Report,” which drew on survey data collected in 2017 from 3,200 IT professionals. Specific findings should be interpreted in the context of that survey period.