This article draws on research and reporting originally published on Forbes.com (2017). Specific statistics and study findings are attributed to their original sources below.
Two Trends, One Strategy
Cloud computing and DevOps did not emerge in isolation. Both matured during roughly the same period, and both were driven by the same underlying pressure: the need for organizations to deliver software faster, more reliably, and at lower cost. It is therefore worth asking whether the value of each approach can really be measured independently — or whether the two are fundamentally intertwined.
The answer, supported by multiple industry research efforts, is that cloud and DevOps amplify each other. Organizations that combine both at a mature level consistently outperform those that rely on only one.
What the Research Says
DevOps Research
The 2017 State of DevOps Report, published by DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) and Puppet Labs, documented the measurable advantages high-performing DevOps organizations enjoy over their lower-performing peers. Key themes included the value of automation, the cross-industry applicability of DevOps practices, and the cultural changes required to sustain them.
Separately, research commissioned by CA Technologies and conducted by Coleman Parkes examined what happens when agile software development methodologies are combined with DevOps practices. According to that study, organizations that adopted both reported a 41% increase in operational efficiency and a 63% better probability of winning new business.
Cloud Research
Cisco’s Global Cloud Index has tracked the growth of cloud computing and the traffic it generates on an annual basis. RightScale’s State of the Cloud Report (at the time of the original article’s publication) found that 58% of enterprises had adopted a hybrid cloud strategy — reflecting how mainstream cloud adoption had become even by 2017.
Despite this volume of research, most studies examined cloud and DevOps separately. The combined effect of using both together was less thoroughly explored — which is what made the CA/FreeForm Dynamics study described below notable.
Real-World Examples: Spotify and Netflix
Two of the most frequently cited DevOps success stories — Spotify and Netflix — are also standout examples of effective cloud adoption. This is not a coincidence.
Spotify’s Organizational Model
Spotify’s engineering culture became widely studied for its use of autonomous, cross-functional teams organized into Squads, grouped into Tribes, with horizontal coordination through Chapters and Guilds. This structure was designed to enable rapid, independent delivery while maintaining consistency — core DevOps goals. Spotify’s product itself is cloud-delivered, using cloud infrastructure to power its personalized music streaming at global scale.
Netflix’s Chaos Engineering
Netflix pioneered the concept of Chaos Engineering through its Chaos Monkey tool, which deliberately introduced random failures into production systems to test their resilience. This eventually evolved into the broader Simian Army — a suite of tools that inject various failure conditions, latency issues, and configuration problems to surface weaknesses before they cause user-facing outages.
This practice of continuous, automated failure testing aligns directly with DevOps principles: tight feedback loops, shared responsibility between development and operations, and a relentless focus on reliability and user experience. Netflix runs this infrastructure entirely in the cloud, making cloud elasticity central to the approach.
The Combined-Effect Study: CA and FreeForm Dynamics
To move beyond anecdote and measure the combined effect of cloud and DevOps at scale, CA Technologies commissioned FreeForm Dynamics to survey approximately 1,000 IT professionals worldwide. Respondents were asked to self-assess the maturity of their organization’s use of both cloud and DevOps, then grouped into four categories:
- Slow Movers (48%): Not advanced users of either cloud or DevOps. They may be using both, but at an early or inconsistent level.
- DevOps Devotees (15%): Advanced DevOps adopters who had not yet matured their cloud usage to the same degree.
- Cloud Champions (17%): Organizations running mature cloud operations but with less sophisticated DevOps practices.
- Delivery Disrupters (18%): Advanced users of both DevOps and cloud computing simultaneously.
Software Delivery Performance Results
The study evaluated all groups against a composite software delivery performance metric, combining five dimensions: speed, quality, predictability, user experience, and cost control.
The results were clear:
- Delivery Disrupters (cloud + DevOps together) saw an 81% improvement in overall software delivery performance.
- DevOps Devotees saw a 52% improvement.
- Cloud Champions saw a 53% improvement.
The gap between using one technology well and using both together was substantial — nearly 30 percentage points of improvement in overall software delivery performance.
Why Cloud and DevOps Reinforce Each Other
The synergy between cloud and DevOps is not accidental. Each addresses limitations that the other introduces:
- Elasticity enables continuous delivery: Cloud infrastructure can be provisioned and torn down programmatically, which makes it practical to spin up isolated environments for testing, staging, and deployment — foundational to CI/CD pipelines.
- DevOps makes cloud manageable: Without automation, monitoring, and shared operational ownership — all DevOps practices — cloud environments can quickly become sprawling and expensive. DevOps disciplines bring governance and predictability to dynamic cloud resources.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Tools like Terraform, Ansible, and AWS CloudFormation allow teams to define and version infrastructure the same way they manage application code — a practice that requires both cloud APIs and DevOps workflows to be effective.
- Faster feedback loops: Cloud platforms provide on-demand compute for automated testing and monitoring. DevOps teams use this to shorten the time between a code commit and validated, production-ready software.
Key Takeaways for Engineering Teams
Whether your organization is just beginning its DevOps journey, maturing its cloud strategy, or trying to figure out how to integrate both, the evidence points in one direction: treat cloud and DevOps as a unified strategy, not separate initiatives.
- Assess maturity in both areas independently — gaps in one will limit the returns from the other.
- Prioritize automation across both cloud provisioning and software delivery pipelines.
- Use cloud-native tooling (managed Kubernetes, serverless functions, cloud build services) alongside DevOps practices rather than treating them as separate tool stacks.
- Measure performance with composite metrics that cover speed, quality, cost, and user experience — not deployment frequency alone.
- You do not need to be Netflix or Spotify to benefit. The FreeForm Dynamics research found improvements across organizations of all sizes and geographies.
The cloud provides the platform. DevOps provides the practices. Together, they provide the foundation for competitive software delivery at scale.