The DevOps movement is the logical consequence of decades of improvements in technology and IT processes whose goal is to instill greater interaction and productivity between teams of application development and IT operations. The ultimate goal is to allow the DevOps to respond faster to business needs and thus provide applications and services providing customers with significant value.

Applications are at the heart of the DevOps movement, as these teams play a vital role in how companies meet the requirements of their customers. Today, technological priority DevOps movement primarily concerns the accelerated delivery of applications and their automation.

The automated server management tool for DevOps, JumpCloud, and SoftLayer released a new survey results from its DevOps Conference that stated that increased need of automation is required for companies to adapt to DevOps culture. The survey respondents said the difficulties come from the deployment and patching activities followed by user management and log file analysis and forensics.

Attendees of the event unanimously said that manual tasks to develop, test, deploy, validate, adjust still remain a critical bottleneck for companies. To eliminate these hurdles, companies are looking for ways to automate tasks.

“We decided to hold this DevOps conference with Foundry Group, TechStars, and Bullet Time Ventures companies in order to gain some base level insight and understanding into the state of the DevOps movement,” said Rajat Bhargava, CEO, JumpCloud. “The conference aimed to advance the DevOps movement through the sharing of best practices and a compilation of survey data from a highly targeted respondent group of leading voices in the DevOps movement. We could not have been happier with the over 200 leaders in the field from over 100 companies who were able to attend and help us to gain and share some insight into this increasingly important movement.”

When asked which cloud service providers companies prefer, nearly 55 percent choose to prefer AWS, followed by Rackspace (14 percent), SoftLayer (6 percent), Digital Ocean (6 percent), Heroku (6 percent) and others (13 percent). Moreover, more than 75 percent reported using some form of configuration automation tool such as Chef or Puppet to automate DevOps tasks, one-third reported using some form of patching solution, while other prefers utilizing pre-built images.

Last month, JumpCloud has closed a $3.1 million Series A round of funding to expand its sales and software engineering team to boost server management automation.

Manual management leads to automation

The respondents said that deployment and patching, user management and log file analysis and forensics are pain areas for enterprises to automate DevOps tasks.

One way to minimize the introduction of manual errors is to automate the deployment in order to speed up the testing process and delivery. Automating deployments makes software faster to reach production servers (physical, virtual or in the cloud) to get to market faster. You can establish repeatable processes to deploy applications, error-free, scalable, and have the ability to see which version exactly where you are. By contrast, with manual deployments, differences in the development, testing and operations environments – along with tribal and disjointed processes – can help you have failed deployments.

Puppet Labs, Chef and Opscode are garnering a lot of attention these days with in the open-source community. Additionally, a large suite of good regression tests tools such as FitNesse, Selenium, soapUI and others give developers freedom to IT automation that more easily scale not only across departments but also multiple organizations.