This year’s survey by JetBrains on the State of Developer Ecosystem sought to analyze operational details and preferences among DevOps environments. This survey revealed interesting results. As well as comparisons between 2023 choices vs. those of 2022. This report is intended to analyze the results and draw conclusions from these evolving trends.
To what degree are you personally involved in infrastructure development (DevOps)?
More than half of respondents (55%) were at least involved in DevOps to some extent, yet the remaining 45% were not personally involved.
Figures from 2022 to 2023 were fairly close, with 52% of respondents having some level of involvement, and 48% in 2022 having only heard about it, which is roughly the same answer as “I’m not personally involved.”
During development, do you use any virtualization or containers?
Docker was the top choice at more than half of respondent companies, with “none at all” a second pick at 39%. Kubernetes was selected by nearly a quarter of respondents (23%), and a small minority use Vagrant or other options.
There was apparently no corresponding question asked in 2022, so comparisons between the two sets of answers are not available.
How do you use containers?
Approximately half of respondents are running multiple applications containers, using a single container for an application as well as backup services and relying upon dockerized utilities, emphasizing the most common trends entailing container usage.
Interestingly, multiple container usage has gone down since last year, whereas the other two choices are more popular this year. This indicates the trend of multiple containers may be a fading concept.
What tools do you use to work with K8s clusters?
Kubectl and cloud provider consoles/CLI accounted for 81% of all answers, whereas Kubernetes-related tools accounted for nearly half of all answers. The other answers were diverse and spread out across half of all respondents.
What configuration management tools do you / your organization use?
While there was no clear “winner” here, 34% of respondents opted for Ansible or a custom solution. CRD for Kubernetes was just slightly more popular (12%) than the other distinct options, but it’s worth pointing out that half of all respondents aren’t using configuration management tools at all, which is not optimal for operational efficiency.
Interestingly, nobody participating in this survey is using Terraform anymore — at least not for configuration management — and they now seem to be using nothing, whereas over a quarter of last year’s respondents were. On the flip side, nobody was using CRD for Kubernetes last year, and Puppet, Chef, Salt and other choices have largely remained unchanged.
What server templating tools do you / your organization regularly use?
Docker was by far the favorite, with 64% of respondents opting for this choice. Vagrant and Packer trailed vastly behind at 5% each, and once again “None” was a surprisingly high selection, with nearly a third of respondents opting to use no such tools.
These trends are virtually unchanged over the past year, proving the continued popularity of Docker as well as a barely discernible decrease among companies using no such tools.
What infrastructure-provisioning tools do you / your organization use?
While Terraform has lost ground in the configuration management space, 25%Â of respondents are still using it for infrastructure-provisioning. About a third of respondents favor configuration management tools, AWS CloudFormation and a custom solution. “None” was once again a common pick, with nearly four-tenths of respondents relying on no such tools.
This question sought to differentiate the choice of infrastructure provisioning tools based on job roles. DevOps engineers were more likely to select Terraform, configuration management tools and custom solutions. The other options were largely the same pick across the board.
The difference in the use of these tools was largely the same across 2022 vs 2023, except for the fact that fewer people are using any such tools in 2023, but 14% more are opting for configuration management tools to manage their infrastructure.
What container orchestration services do you use in production?
Kubernetes is a strong favorite here, with over a quarter of respondents choosing Amazon products such as ECS / Fargate or EKS. The other choices, while in minimal use, were fairly diverse, and yet again, “None” represented a significant portion (40%) of all answers.
Kubernetes’ use increased by 16% over the past year, whereas many of the other choices had similar representation over 2022 vs. 2023. Interestingly, 22% of respondents opted to try Google, Azure, OpenShift and HashiCorp options in 2023.
How familiar are you with Kubernetes?
While only 8% selected “very familiar,” and 15% chose “I’m not very familiar,” there was an array of different types of experience with Kubernetes represented by this question. Running pods, using Kubernetes configuration via CI and working with Kubernetes configurations were fairly typical usage examples.
The most significant takeaway here is that the number of people not very familiar with Kubernetes dropped by 9%, signifying its expanded usage.
What is the highest level of access you have to your company’s development and / or staging Kubernetes?
Seventy-five percent of respondents have at least some level of management capability in their Kubernetes environment. Only 14% have read-only access, but that at least still constitutes a level of hands-on usage to extract the benefits of Kubernetes.
The statistics remained largely unchanged between 2022 and 2023.
How do you run your containerized application during development?
Docker was again a clear favorite here, and Kubernetes trailed “Outside containers” by just 3%.
Docker usage increased the most in 2023, but “Outside containers” and “Kubernetes” also gained some measure of ground.
Where do you keep your artifacts?
Whereas six-tenths of respondents selected a diverse array of responses, there was no standout choice. Docker Hub had the highest level of selections at 13%, but the remaining options didn’t trail far behind.
The statistics remained largely unchanged between 2022 and 2023.
Where do you host the applications, databases and / or services that you or your company develop?
Hybrid environments (cloud and local) are in use among some respondents. Cloud was favored the most, but only by a small margin.
The statistics remained largely unchanged between 2022 and 2023.
Where do you primarily host?
Cloud servers are used exclusively less here than in the prior question, with hybrid models being far more common. Private servers are exclusively used by just over a quarter of respondents (26%), showing this trend isn’t likely to evaporate in the near future.
Exclusive cloud service use decreased over the past year, with hybrid models taking up the slack, demonstrating the shift in favor of the popularity of the latter option.
How familiar are you with Docker?
Intermediate to advanced Docker familiarity accounted for nearly two-thirds of respondents’ answers (63%) having at least a working knowledge of Docker processes. A fifth of replies indicated little familiarity with Docker, and slightly less indicated a basic knowledge of the concept.
The statistics remained largely unchanged between 2022 and 2023.
How familiar are you with Docker Compose?
Over half of respondents (58%) indicated intermediate to advanced Docker Compose familiarity, while 41% reported little awareness of it.
The statistics remained largely unchanged between 2022 and 2023.
