Usage of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is prevalent, but like with any technology, the pros aren’t without cons. IaC has the potential to improve reliability, security, and development velocity, but in reality, developers are running into some issues using this practice.
Insights into some of these challenges were revealed in new research called Stacked Up: The IaC Maturity Report, conducted by StackGen, a company that offers Generative Infrastructure from Code (IfC), which adds more automation to IaC by generating infrastructure from application code.
StackGen’s research found that 56% of respondents are having trouble enforcing consistent configurations. A similar number of people, 54%, said that managing multiple tools is introducing added complexity.
Over half of developers (56%) are spending at least 20% of their time on infrastructure management tasks, which takes away time that could be spent developing and adds to cognitive load.
Though IaC has been around for a while now, the report found that only 13% of organizations have achieved IaC maturity, meaning that provisioning and deployment are fully automated across development, test, staging, and production environments and workflows are repeatable.
Thirty-nine percent say their maturity level is “established,” meaning that provisioning and deployment are automated across many environments; 42% said their maturity is a work in progress; and 7% have minimal adoption.
Almost unanimously, 98% of respondents feel their company is in need of better IaC expertise. The biggest areas for improvement include writing effective IaC (43% of respondents) and governance and security (32%). Other areas that could use improvement were documentation, consistency, management, and better support for specific application needs.
The survey was conducted in collaboration with Dimensional Research in August and September of this year. They gathered responses from 315 people who were responsible for IaC, including both developers and managers, at companies with over 150 developers.
