Vamp.io, a company providing a release automation platform, recently published the State of Cloud-Native Release Orchestration 2021 survey results. Results show that Kubernetes and microservices are popular, and high-risk release strategies are still being used.
A total of 253 participants were interviewed to understand challenges, trends, and opportunities for improvement to release and test software in production. 72% of participants said they use Kubernetes in production, and 81% of participants said they are using microservices in production. 34% of the participants mentioned using AWS as their cloud provider, with hybrid cloud and Microsoft Azure being used by 15% and 14% of participants, respectively.
Source: https://vamp.io/state-of-cloud-native-release-orchestration-2021
To release new versions of code in production, the survey gathered responses on release strategies in use. 57% of participants use a rolling update, 22% use blue-green, and 7% employ a big-bang release approach. Canary releasing capabilities are used by 9% of participants.
The survey revealed that weekly release frequency is preferred by 34% of participants, and 12% of participants release daily in production.
Validating the release in production remains a manual task. On average, it takes 2.2 hours for four persons to validate the release. Survey results also stated that:
" Teams that have a higher release frequency are spending less time on validation per release."
Speaking of safety nets in production, the average time to rollback a release is 45 minutes. 26% of participants indicated that they roll back proactively and 53% said they do the rollback manually.
Source: https://vamp.io/state-of-cloud-native-release-orchestration-2021
Participants indicated that Elastic and Prometheus are extensively used to ensure the health of release in production. The released microservices are monitored from a technical perspective (response time, latency, etc.) and also a business perspective (orders per second, shopping basket value, etc.). Survey results also showed that data from monitoring tools is not integrated with the release pipeline.
Regarding the business driver for going cloud-native, 35% of participants indicated they wanted to improve performance and scalability. In comparison, 23% stated that they wanted to improve development speed and time-to-market.
Source: https://vamp.io/state-of-cloud-native-release-orchestration-2021
When asked about the responsibilities of the roles in their organization, 34% of participants said that their developers are responsible for building features and releasing to the end-users in production. To monitor the issues and outages, results show that DevOps and IT Operations teams are responsible.
To address the growing need for release automation, teams need to balance different release frequencies associated with distributed systems. In such a scenario, releasing microservices in production comes with its challenges. 20% of participants indicated that dependency management is the biggest challenge, with 14% showing internal processes and communication also play an essential role.
The complete State of Cloud-Native Release Orchestration 2021 can be downloaded from the Vamp.io website (registration required).