Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are rapidly emerging as the leading engineering practice for enterprises accelerating their application modernization, according to new research from Red Hat.
68% of Red Hat respondents highlighted “improving CI/CD” as their primary focus in application modernization, while 66% of respondents noted “data modernization” as a key business objective over the past year .
More than half (53%) of respondents also revealed that they have accelerated their efforts to automate workloads, while 51% have started investing in “serverless computing.”
The popularity of CI/CD came as a surprise to Red Hat, according to program manager Tobias Hartwig.
speaking to ITPro At KubeCon 2024 in Paris, Hartwig said the study highlighted evolving enterprise interpretations of application modernization, as well as exploring new ways to accelerate infrastructure transformation efforts.
A 2021 study from the company showed that most companies had prioritized containerization as a key method for overhauling legacy applications and infrastructure. Two years later, the picture seems to have changed significantly.
“We asked it two years ago and back then, for many customers, it meant containerization,” Hartwig said. ITPro.
Seeing this recent change was interesting, he said, and could be attributed in some ways to the lessening of the “hype” around containerization.
“People realize what the reality is and what the priorities are,” he added.
CI/CD has gained popularity since 2021
The decline in containerization has become more evident thanks to the increased focus on CI/CD, which last time was much closer to the “bottom of the list,” according to Hartwig.
Red Hat Application Modernization 2021 The report showed that containerization and CI/CD occupied almost opposite positions, a degree of change that is “rare” to see from one survey to another, according to the wording of the report itself.
Hartwig described this shift as surprising, explaining that “as vendors, we often feel like… everyone is doing CI/CD,” but that the report's numbers clearly show an overestimation of how far along the CI/CD market is. CD.
The importance of CI/CD doesn't just apply to new product development either, Hartwig added, as companies need to draw on their legacy infrastructure to unlock the full benefits of CI/CD.
Data modernization as one of the main definitions of application modernization in the report can largely be attributed to the increasing focus on AI within organizations, as well as the importance of “modernizing data sharing” between applications.
“Now that people are starting to think about how to leverage AI, they realize there's a data problem there,” Hartwig said.
“They need to prepare their data and they need to be able to collect it for… within applications, but also for AI use cases,” he added.
In terms of the report's most fundamental findings, the main drivers of application modernization focused on security, reliability, and scalability.
According to the report, respondents almost “universally” cited these factors as factors in their organization's decision to modernize.
