At the State of DevOps in Switzerland 2023 event, I joined Adrian Kosmaczewski from VSHN to present the latest findings on DevOps adoption in the Swiss market. Adrian shared four years of survey data, while I focused on how to successfully scale DevOps through platform engineering and the concept of the digital factory. This event brought together DevOps professionals both on-site and virtually for presentations and a lively panel discussion.
Four Years of DevOps Data in Switzerland#
Adrian kicked things off with a summary of the State of DevOps Report Switzerland, now in its fourth edition since 2020. The data paints a clear picture: DevOps in Switzerland is here to stay. Around 85% of respondents consistently report positive experiences with DevOps, and adoption continues to grow year over year.
The technology landscape shows strong trends. Linux dominates production environments. Python, Java, JavaScript, Go, and C# remain the top five programming languages. Container technology has reached over 84% adoption. Kubernetes has clearly won the orchestration battle, with Red Hat OpenShift 4 leading as the most popular distribution, followed by managed Kubernetes offerings like AKS, EKS, and GKE.
“DevOps in Switzerland is here to stay. Companies are applying DevOps, they’re very happy with it, and the perception of DevOps is really good on the Swiss market.” — Adrian Kosmaczewski
An interesting finding: Microsoft Azure remains the leading cloud provider in Switzerland, though AWS is showing strong growth after establishing a Swiss region. The CI/CD tooling landscape is dominated by Terraform, GitLab, GitHub, Ansible, and Jenkins, with ArgoCD emerging as a rising star that Adrian predicted would break into the top five.
Why DevOps Matters: From Projects to Products#
In my presentation, I shared the challenge I see repeatedly when joining companies: the broken value stream. Business teams throw requirements over a wall of confusion to developers, who throw code over to testers, who hand off to operations, and the final result disappoints everyone. These walls of confusion come from silo organizations and a lack of alignment.
The root cause often lies in the project mindset. Projects have fixed start and end dates, fixed budgets, and focus on maximizing output: the number of features delivered. Products, on the other hand, focus on understanding the customer, solving their problems, and achieving real outcomes. DevOps supports this product mindset by aligning the entire organization around the value stream.
The science backs this up. The DORA metrics from the Accelerate research show that elite DevOps performers achieve 208 times more frequent deployments, 106 times faster lead times, 2,604 times faster recovery from failures, and 7 times lower change failure rates. And these numbers continue to accelerate.
Scaling DevOps with Platform Engineering#
While doing DevOps in a single team is already challenging, scaling it across an organization is even harder. About 50% of Swiss companies have combined Dev and Ops teams, but many still struggle with the cognitive load this creates. New team members often take one to three months just to get access to all tools and become productive.
The solution I presented is platform engineering. Instead of each product team building and maintaining their own tooling, you create a dedicated platform team that provides a shared foundation: API gateways, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, repositories, synthetic test data, and everything else teams need to be productive.
“The platform team creates a product which is consumed by the product teams. With platform engineering, you are building a platform which is the foundation of your digital factory.”
This is not about creating another silo. The platform team delivers a product that enables product teams to focus on what they do best: building features for their customers. It is the industrialization of software development, automating the boring stuff so developers can focus on real value creation.
DevOps Adoption Challenges in Switzerland#
The panel discussion surfaced important challenges specific to the Swiss market. Switzerland has a historically hierarchical culture, which can clash with the cross-functional, autonomous teams that DevOps requires. When you break down silos and create product teams, some management positions become redundant, which creates resistance.
Adrian made a powerful point about trust: “You hired these people to solve problems that you don’t know how to solve. If you hire somebody, just trust them.” This trust enables the processes, the people, and the technology choices that make DevOps successful.
We also discussed the common misconception that speed alone is the goal. As I emphasized, you can deploy faster and still deliver the wrong thing. The real goal is solving customer problems, and faster delivery simply shortens the feedback loop so you can learn and adapt more quickly.
Real-World Business Value#
I shared a concrete example from a private bank where we moved the entire development environment from slow, painful virtual machines inside the bank to the cloud. This required removing confidential data from source code, creating synthetic test data, and building simulators for interfaces. The result: a 25% improvement in delivery speed, the ability to hire distributed teams, and eventually reducing deployment cycles from three months to two weeks. The risk dropped dramatically, and the organization could finally deliver continuous value.
Key Takeaways#
- DevOps in Switzerland is firmly established with 85% positive perception and growing adoption across all company sizes and industries.
- Container technology and Kubernetes have become standard, with over 84% adoption and managed Kubernetes offerings growing strongly.
- Platform engineering is the key to scaling DevOps by reducing cognitive load on product teams and providing a shared foundation for continuous delivery.
- The shift from projects to products is essential for unlocking the real benefits of DevOps, focusing on outcomes rather than output.
- Trust and cultural change are the hardest parts of DevOps adoption, especially in Switzerland’s traditionally hierarchical organizations.
- Science proves DevOps works: elite performers dramatically outperform others on all four DORA metrics, and these gaps continue to widen.