DevOps Isn’t Dead, but It’s Not in Great Health Either
DevOps maturity now looks less like adoption and more like operational discipline. The articleโs most useful signal for technical teams is not that CI/CD is failing, but that its benefits depend on how much process sprawl a delivery system can absorb. When deployment speed stalls, the likely bottleneck is often not the code itself but the coordination overhead around it.
For architects and platform teams, the practical question is whether the delivery toolchain has become a patchwork of overlapping services, policies, and notifications. Multiple CI/CD systems can introduce integration friction, duplicated configuration, inconsistent credentials, and weak handoffs between build, test, release, and recovery stages. That creates a hidden systems problem: the pipeline becomes another distributed application that must be designed, observed, and governed.
The reliability angle matters just as much as velocity. Recovery time, alert handling, and release consistency depend on pipeline clarity, not tool count. If teams are absorbing too many alerts or switching among too many interfaces, the operational cost shows up as slower incident response and lower confidence in automation. In that sense, pipeline usability is a resilience issue, not just a developer experience issue.
The takeaway for decision-makers is to treat CI/CD as an architectural layer with measurable outcomes. Consolidating toolchains where possible, standardizing deployment paths, and aligning metrics to delivery and recovery performance can reveal whether automation is reducing friction or simply relocating it. The right setup should lower cognitive load while improving release reliability across the full software lifecycle.
SEATTLE โ Co-hosted at Open Source Summit (OSSummit) North America, the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) reported at cdCon in its fifth annual State of CI/CD Report that while 83% of developers are actively engaged in DevOps, thereโs been a troubling increase in the proportion of low performers in deployment metrics.
So what does that mean? DevOps is all about making it easier for developers and system administrators to complete software work quickly and efficiently. Thatโs not been happening.
Instead, out of the tens of thousands of developers surveyed by SlashDataโs Developer Nation, a mere 14% can get code into production in a single day. Thatโs about the same as we saw when SlashData started asking this question in the third quarter of 2020. As for deploying code multiple times per day, itโs actually shrunk toย 9%, from 11% in 2020.
Only 11% of DevOps users reported being able to restore service in under an hour.
Isnโt that the whole point ofย Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)? Why, yes. Yes, it is.
Another reason we use DevOps is that when bad things happen โ and they always do, usually right when the boss is looking over your shoulder โ you can get things back up and working quickly. Alas, thatโs not the case.
Only 11% of DevOps users reported being able to restore service in under an hour. OK, thatโs hard. But, itโs not any better than where we were a few years ago. Worse still, these days, 41% of users report taking more than a week to restore service. In 2020, 34% could get things back up and running in just over a week.
So, whatโs the problem? The reportโs authors speculate that โIt may be that the ubiquity of DevOps practices has allowed developers and organizations to increase the complexity of projects they are involved in, counteracting the benefits to development velocity. In other words, DevOps practices have likely made the development velocity of complex projects comparable to simpler projects without DevOps practices.โ
They make another point: โAs DevOps matures, developers go from exploring the space to focusing only on the technologies they find most useful. However, usefulness does not always directly correlate to deployment performance.โ
Thatโs a disconnect that needs to be addressed. Just because you like, say, Jenkins, but all the teams that use GitHub Actions are more productive, spells out that you need to reconsider what DevOps tools youโre using.
Using multiple CI/CD tools, by the way, the report states, is a mistake. โDeployment performance is worse when using multiple CI/CD tools of the same form. Thatโs because, the researchers theorize, because of interoperability challenges.
Another related problem is that while deployments tend to go faster for people who use more DevOps tools, they also add more mental load to their work. A particularly troublesome example of this is alarm fatigue. When one program after another constantly chirps at you with one alert after another, itโs all too easy to stop paying attention and let real problems slide into your production pipeline.
With that said, donโt throw the productivity baby out with the CI/CD bathwater. Developers who do master multiple tools tend to get more done than their counterparts who donโt have many programs in their toolbox.
Properly used โ note I say properly โ the use of CI/CD pipelines goes hand-in-hand with better deployment performance across all DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)ย metrics. Used poorly; itโs another story.
I also found it disturbing that thereโs been a slight decline in CI/CD usage. In Q3 2023, 33% of developers were using CI to build and test automatically their code changes. In Q1 2024, it was down to 29% of developers. Similarly, 29% in Q3 2023 used CD to automate their code deployments. In Q1 2024. It was 29%.
Whatโs going on here?
I think itโs high time that companies start asking themselves what the right blend is. They need to use DevOps and CI/CD tools specifically to get the most good from them. They are helpful. No one but Luddites doubts that. But, they donโt appear to be as helpful as they should be.
Perhaps the CIF and other vendor-neutral DevOps organizations should take a long, hard look at how weโre using these programs. Something appears to be amiss here.
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