The JetBrains State of Developer Ecosystem survey for 2023 aimed to analyze the preferences and operational details within DevOps environments. The survey revealed interesting findings, including comparisons between choices in 2023 and those in 2022. This report aims to analyze the results and draw conclusions regarding the evolving trends.
Regarding involvement in infrastructure development (DevOps), over half of the respondents (55%) were at least partially involved, while the remaining 45% were not personally involved.
In terms of using virtualization or containers during development, Docker was the top choice for over half of the respondent companies, followed by “none at all” at 39%. Kubernetes was selected by nearly a quarter of the respondents, and a small minority used Vagrant or other options.
Approximately half of the respondents used multiple application containers, with a single container for an application, backup services, and dockerized utilities being the most common trends in container usage. It is notable that the trend of using multiple containers seems to be decreasing.
The majority of respondents used Kubectl and cloud provider consoles/CLI to work with K8s clusters, while Kubernetes-related tools were also widely used. Other responses were varied among the respondents.
In terms of configuration management tools, Ansible or a custom solution were the most popular choices, followed closely by CRD for Kubernetes. However, it is worth noting that half of the respondents did not use any configuration management tools, which is not optimal for operational efficiency.
For server templating tools, Docker was the preferred choice, while Vagrant and Packer had lower usage. Surprisingly, around a third of respondents did not use any server templating tools.
In terms of infrastructure-provisioning tools, Terraform had experienced a decrease in usage, but still had a presence among 25% of the respondents. Configuration management tools, AWS CloudFormation, and custom solutions were also popular choices. However, a significant portion of respondents (nearly four-tenths) relied on no infrastructure-provisioning tools.
Kubernetes was the preferred container orchestration service for over a quarter of the respondents, with Amazon products also being favored. Other choices had minimal usage, and a significant portion of respondents selected “None.”
When asked about familiarity with Kubernetes, only a small percentage (8%) indicated being “very familiar,” while 15% claimed to have little familiarity. The majority of respondents had experience with running pods, using Kubernetes configuration via CI, and working with Kubernetes configurations.
Regarding access levels to their company’s development and/or staging Kubernetes, 75% of respondents had some level of management capability. Only 14% had read-only access, but even this level of access allowed for hands-on usage of Kubernetes.
During development, Docker remained the preferred choice for running containerized applications. Kubernetes trailed slightly behind “Outside containers.”
There was no standout choice for the location of artifacts, as respondents selected various options. Docker Hub had the highest level of selections, but the other options were not far behind.
Cloud was the most popular choice for hosting applications, databases, and/or services, but hybrid environments (cloud and local) were also in use. The statistics in this area remained largely unchanged between 2022 and 2023.
Hybrid models were more common than exclusive use of cloud servers for primary hosting. Private servers were exclusively used by a quarter of the respondents, indicating a sustained trend.
Familiarity with Docker was high, with nearly two-thirds of respondents having intermediate to advanced knowledge of Docker processes. Less than a fifth reported little familiarity, and even fewer had only a basic understanding.
Familiarity with Docker Compose was also relatively high, with over half of the respondents indicating intermediate to advanced knowledge. Around 41% reported little awareness of Docker Compose.
RabbitMQ and Kafka were the most popular tools for messaging and delivery, followed by Amazon SQS. Other choices were selected fairly evenly by the respondents.
Message brokers/queues (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ) were used by 35% of the companies surveyed, indicating that they were not widely adopted by all respondents. These statistics remained largely unchanged between 2022 and 2023.
