This article summarises findings originally reported on cio.com and based on Puppet’s State of DevOps Market Segmentation Report, which drew on data collected across Puppet’s annual State of DevOps surveys.
Introduction
Since Puppet published its first State of DevOps Report in 2012, the annual survey has accumulated nearly 30,000 responses from practitioners around the world. That body of data makes it possible to look beyond global averages and ask more granular questions: Do DevOps adoption patterns differ by geography? Does industry vertical influence IT performance? And where does automation actually begin?
The State of DevOps Market Segmentation Report — Puppet’s first attempt at slicing the data by peer group — was designed to help organisations benchmark themselves against companies of similar size, region, and industry rather than against an undifferentiated global average.
Automation as the Primary DevOps On-Ramp
One of the report’s clearest findings is that most organisations begin their DevOps journey by targeting their most acute pain points — and that automation is the most common first step. Rather than starting with lean process design or metrics visualisation, teams typically reach for automation tools first.
The three most common starting points are:
- Continuous integration (CI) — automating the build and test cycle triggered by code commits.
- Deployment automation — reducing the manual steps required to move a build from a passing test suite into a target environment.
- Infrastructure automation — codifying server and environment configuration so it can be provisioned repeatably and at scale.
The motivation is straightforward: every manual handoff in a release pipeline is a potential delay, a source of inconsistency, and a drain on engineering time. Automation removes those friction points, shortens lead times, and frees teams to focus on building features rather than shepherding releases.
However, the data also shows that automation is far less pervasive than industry conversation might suggest. Despite widespread discussion of CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code, most companies report significant amounts of manual work remaining across their software delivery lifecycle. Automation is relieving the sharpest pain points, but few organisations have achieved end-to-end automated pipelines.
Measuring IT Performance: Throughput and Stability
To compare DevOps maturity across segments, the 2017 State of DevOps survey measured IT performance along two dimensions:
- Throughput — how frequently a team commits code and how quickly that code moves from commit to production deployment.
- Stability — how fast a system recovers from unplanned downtime (mean time to recovery, or MTTR) and the ratio of successful changes to failed ones (change failure rate).
High performers excel on both dimensions simultaneously. According to the report’s figures, high-performing organisations deploy code 46 times more frequently than low performers and achieve a 96 times faster mean time to recovery. They also have shorter lead times from commit to deployment and lower change failure rates — demonstrating that speed and stability are complementary outcomes of mature DevOps practice, not trade-offs.
Regional Performance Differences
Segmenting by geography reveals meaningful variation in the distribution of high, medium, and low performers:
- India, Japan, and Northern Asia had the highest proportion of high-performance IT organisations at 24%.
- Mexico, Central America, and South America followed with 20% of organisations rated as high performers.
- Central and Eastern Europe had the highest proportion of medium performers at 53%.
- The United States and Canada had the highest proportion of low performers at 45%.
A notable finding across all regions: more than half of surveyed organisations met at least a medium performance threshold. The widespread narrative that DevOps is still a niche practice does not fully hold up — adoption is broad, even if high performance remains concentrated.
Industry Performance Differences
When the data is broken down by industry vertical, the picture at the top is surprisingly uniform: most industries had roughly the same small share of high performers, clustered around 15%. The more significant variation appears in the low-performance tier.
Industries with the lowest proportion of low performers (i.e., doing relatively well):
- Media and entertainment — only 23% of organisations rated as low performers, the best result of any industry.
- Retail — 31% low performers.
Industries with the highest proportion of low performers (i.e., lagging behind):
- Financial services — 54% of organisations rated as low performers.
- Insurance and industrial/manufacturing — each at 53%.
Heavily regulated industries like financial services and insurance face additional constraints — compliance requirements, audit trails, and risk-averse change management cultures — that can slow DevOps adoption even when the technical appetite is present.
The Automation Ceiling: Change Approval Remains Manual
Even among organisations actively investing in DevOps, automation does not penetrate every stage of the software delivery pipeline equally. The data shows a clear pattern across industries:
- Configuration management and software deployment are the areas most commonly automated.
- Testing retains more manual steps than deployment, with many organisations yet to achieve comprehensive automated test coverage.
- Change approval is the stage most resistant to automation. Even in the media, entertainment, and technology sectors — the industries with the lowest rates of manual work elsewhere — more than half of organisations still rely on manual change approval processes.
This is a meaningful insight for teams planning their automation roadmaps. Organisations are willing to automate execution but remain reluctant to remove human judgement from the decision to release. Whether this reflects genuine risk management, organisational culture, regulatory obligation, or simply inertia will vary by company — but the pattern is consistent across sectors and company sizes.
The practical takeaway: if your organisation is automating builds and deployments but still routing every release through a manual change advisory board (CAB) or approval ticket, you are in good company. The data suggests that even high-performing organisations blend automated execution with human oversight at the approval gate.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
- Start with pain points. Automation of your most manual, error-prone processes is a validated entry point for DevOps adoption — not just a theoretical best practice.
- Measure throughput and stability together. Teams that optimise only for speed risk instability. High performers achieve both.
- Benchmark against your peer group. Global averages can be misleading. Regional and industry context matters when assessing where your organisation sits on the performance spectrum.
- Expect automation gaps in testing and change approval. These are industry-wide challenges, not just yours. Prioritise incremental progress rather than waiting for a fully automated pipeline before starting.
- Regulated industries face additional headwinds. If you work in financial services, insurance, or manufacturing, the data confirms that your environment is more challenging — but it also shows room for significant improvement.
For teams looking to improve, the segmentation data offers a useful mirror: knowing where your region and industry sit on the performance curve is the first step toward identifying which practices to prioritise next.