Linux is losing ground, CI
Today the company “Express 42” published detailed report about the state of DevOps in Russia. In the article, we will tell you who took part in the survey and what tools companies use to work with infrastructure in 2024. We will also compare the situation with last year: how much the share of users of Russian server OS has grown and how the transfer of individual tools to the Business Source License has affected their use.
The first State of DevOps Russia report was released in 2020. Since then, the scope of the study has grown exponentially. If the first survey was filled out by 800 respondents, then this year there are more than 4,100. This became possible thanks to partners, one of which in 2024 was Deckhouse — a Russian vendor, whose solutions for building a secure and sustainable IT infrastructure you could read about in our blog. A large survey sample allows us to eliminate chance and obtain more accurate results.
Respondents profile
Role in the company. Among the survey participants, 62.6% are line specialists, such as developers, testers, and administrators. The share of managers has grown slightly compared to last year. More than a quarter of respondents manage individual teams or departments, and top managers in total make up 11.3%:
Companies' industries. Just over a third of respondents work in the information technology industry. In second place, as in previous years, is fintech. And trade in third place is gradually being caught up by industry, the gap between them has narrowed to 0.3 percentage points:
The most interesting thing here is that this year the share of survey participants from IT companies and fintech decreased by a total of 11.39 percentage points, which were distributed among other answer options. Interest in DevOps outside the usual top three industries is growing. The results show a similar picture Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2023 from Google. The difference in the distribution of respondents by industry between the reports is less than 1.5 percentage points:
Experts asked to comment on the results of the study suggest that the trend is related to the success of IT and fintech. Probably, companies from other industries see positive results from the implementation of DevOps practices and also want to automate processes, work more efficiently and flexibly.
Company size. About a quarter of the study participants work in companies with 100 to 499 employees. Organizations with 10,000 employees have risen to second place — large business teams have become even larger. Companies with 500 to 1,999 employees are only slightly behind the giants by half a percentage point. At the same time, the share of very small organizations with 1–4 employees has also grown: if in 2023 there were 3% of them, then this year it is already 5.1%:
Team size. The typical team in which respondents work consists of 4 to 6 people. The share of really large teams, with more than 30 employees, increased by 2%:
Compared to last year, the number of people working alone has increased by 1.4 percentage points. In response to another question in the study, we also see an increase in the number of freelancers: among this year's respondents, they account for 3.8%. Experts attribute the trend to a shortage of qualified personnel, which forces companies to cooperate more willingly with independent specialists, and hypothesize that the specialists themselves may be more interested in cooperating with several employers at once.
Based on the results Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2023the percentage of independent specialists in the world is higher – 10% of survey respondents. However, most of them – 8% – work for one company full-time. And if you look at the broader context and research 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Surveythe share of independent specialists among engineers and developers is almost 18%.
The full report on the state of DevOps in Russia has more information about the respondents. For example, you can see where the study participants live, what tasks they are responsible for, and where they get information for professional development. And we will move on to the main part of the article, where we will talk about the tools that are currently used in the industry.
Operating systems in production
Let us warn you right away that the question “What OS do you use on your servers?” and all subsequent ones gave the opportunity to choose several answer options. Different tools can easily coexist in the company's infrastructure, so do not be surprised by the sum greater than 100%.
Linux still occupies the leading position among server OS, although its use has become less frequent. Thus, the share of users of the Debian/Ubuntu family of OSs has decreased from 61.8 to 53.8%, and Enterprise Linux – from 49 to 33.1%. Nevertheless, all versions of Linux in total are found in companies of 86.9% of the study participants:
Logically, the number of users of unsupported versions of Microsoft OS has decreased: the share of Windows 2008, 2008R2, 2012 and 2012R2 has fallen from 26.6 to 19.5%. The share of other versions of Windows has remained virtually unchanged compared to last year.
Compared to last year, there is a clear increase in the share of users of Russian operating systems:
Astra Linux – by 4.2 percentage points;
RED OS – by 2.1 percentage points;
Other Russian operating systems – by 3.7 percentage points.
The results of the study indicate that the market is switching to domestic distributions. At the same time, experts note that there will be no complete rejection of foreign proprietary OS, since one way or another it is possible to continue using almost any software.
Infrastructure Management Tools
The most noticeable trend is the decline in the share of Ansible. In 2023, we noted that it finally overtook shell scripts in popularity, but this trend has not continued. Bash and Powershell returned to first place: they are used by 63.6% of respondents. The share of custom scripts and tools has also grown slightly:
Another notable observation is the decrease in the number of Packer and Terraform users. This is most likely due to with changes in licensesBoth HashiCorp tools are now available under a Business Source License, which restricts commercial use.
CI/CD Tools
Among CI/CD systems, GitLab CI still holds the leading position. This year, its share has grown a little more and now amounts to 56.7%. The percentage of GitHub Actions users has also increased slightly, despite the risks of blocking.
Overall, CI/CD tools are used by 86.7% of respondents. Continuous delivery practices are spreading slowly but surely. In 2021 and 2023, they were used by just over 82% of survey participants:
In terms of declining indicators, ArgoCD's share has decreased to 14%, while FluxCD's share has decreased to 2.8%. This may be due to the emergence of employees from companies that do not yet use GitOps practices among the respondents.
Version control systems
The question of which source code management solutions respondents use is new, it was not included in previous studies. The undisputed leader here is GitLab with a total share of 65.4%. Second and third place are occupied by GitHub and Bitbucket. Between SaaS and on-premise solutions, the latter win: 61% of respondents use their own installations, and 37.6% use SaaS.
Logging and monitoring tools
Last year, in the comments to the article with the research results, we were asked why Zabbix was not in this block. We corrected ourselves and added it to the list of options. As a result, we learned that Zabbix is still popular and occupies an honorable second place among metrics collection systems. Its share is a significant 52.5%, even more than Prometheus:
The number of Elasticsearch users has dropped significantly: from 42.3 to 25.8%. Some of them could have migrated to the OpenSearch stack: its share grew by 3.4 percentage points. But, as you can see, the changes are disproportionate. Most likely, after the Elasticsearch license change, companies began to use solutions in parallel, and some have already managed to fully migrate to Open Source, while others have not yet.
The number of Prometheus and VictoriaMetrics users decreased. In both cases, the share decreased by almost 5 percentage points. However, the indicators of more niche solutions grew slightly: Graphite increased from 3 to 4.3%, and Grafana Mimir — from 2.5 to 3.1%.
Task Management Services
As for task management solutions, the share of Russian tools has grown significantly: by 10.5 percentage points for SaaS and by 4.8 percentage points for on-prem. A similar trend is observed in documentation services.
Open Source services are stable and maintain a share of 19%:
Conclusions
The average participant in the study is a line specialist in the IT industry. His company has 100 to 499 employees, and a team of 4-6 people.
DevOps is increasingly gaining interest outside of IT companies and fintech. The total share of other industries increased from 39.7 to 51.4%.
The number of users of Russian server operating systems continues to grow. The most popular domestic OS is still Astra Linux. The number of users of Russian solutions for task management and documentation is also increasing.
Bash scripts have regained their primacy in infrastructure management, followed closely by custom solutions.
The transfer of tools to the Business Source License negatively affects the number of users.
The most popular CI/CD system remains GitLab CI. And in general, the share of respondents using CI/CD tools is growing smoothly every year.
Download detailed report State of DevOps Russia 2024 you can on the research website. And in the next article of the series, we will tell you what is happening with containerization and Kubernetes. Spoiler: compared to last year, respondents began to use orchestrators less. At the same time, we are seeing the beginning of a trend towards switching to managed solutions and Russian distributions: for example, the share of users Deckhouse Kubernetes Platform increased by 2.4 percentage points, and other domestic distributions by 4.2 percentage points.
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