Rafay Systems, the platform provider for Kubernetes Management and Operations, has announced independent research that found a developer experience (DevEx) gap between what application developers expect from their organization’s environment provisioning process and the methods currently available to them.

The “Understanding Environment Provisioning for Application Development and Deployment” survey of over 500 platform teams—composed of platform and cloud engineering, architecture and operations professionals—and application developers at enterprises revealed that a quarter of organizations (25%) reportedly take three months or longer to deploy a modern application or service after it’s code complete. The majority of respondents (61%) indicated that environment provisioning is a major roadblock to accelerating the timeframe for application deployments.

The research also revealed that environment provisioning is mired in manual processes and infrastructure dependencies that affect the developer experience—almost all respondents (91%) believe that it is important for application development and delivery, but nearly half (45%) are not satisfied or just somewhat satisfied with their organization’s current process. Because of inefficiencies and complications with provisioning environments, both platform teams and application developers concur that it would be valuable to have a self-service workflow that streamlines the process and provides the right level of governance and automation controls for environment provisioning.

Platform teams and application developers are misaligned on the perceived efficacy of their environment provisioning process.

While 61% of platform teams are very satisfied with their organization’s current process for environment provisioning, over half (52%) of developers are unsatisfied or only somewhat satisfied. These developers stressed that the process is complicated, time-consuming and lacks enough automation. They cite the following perceived inefficiencies:

Lack of automation between DevOps and core developer workflows (55%)
Rolling out environments for applications takes too long (41%)
It takes too much time to learn about and stay up to date with how to provision environments in my datacenter or cloud infrastructure (36%)
It’s too complicated to provision environments in my datacenter or cloud infrastructure (33%)

On the other hand, most platform teams are content with their organization’s current environment provisioning process. However, there is still a considerable number of these technology practitioners who expressed being unsatisfied or only somewhat satisfied (39%).

Although 59% of all respondents said it currently takes less than a month to deploy an application or service from code-complete to production, a significant group of respondents report a longer process. In fact, 25% take three or more months, and 13% take even longer at 6 months or more.

Platform Teams and Application Developers Agree: Self-service is Key

It’s evident that both groups are experiencing roadblocks to accelerating environment provisioning, but there is a silver lining. Despite differing opinions from platform teams and application developers, both parties unanimously agree on a solution for shortcomings in their current environment provisioning process—self-service. Nearly all platform teams (94%) and application developers (89%) believe it would be valuable to have a self-service workflow or portal where developers can provision environments themselves.