The State of DevOps in Higher Education: Opportunities and Challenges

GitLab is a DevOps platform built from the ground up as a single application for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle. GitLab is strongly committed to providing educational institutions free access to software licenses with the goal of advancing science and teaching DevOps through the GitLab for Education Program. Since the GitLab for Education Program’s inception in 2018, we’ve issued 1.7 million seats, equating to over $2 billion, of GitLab’s top tier software licenses to over 1,000 educational institutions in more than 75 countries. In 2020, GitLab surveyed its community with the goal of benchmarking where DevOps as a discipline is in Higher Education. Our findings show that DevOps has been adopted by a wide variety of departments and disciplines across campuses beyond computer science including engineering, natural and social sciences, medical fields, and library science. DevOps is not only being used to transform how coding is taught but it is advancing scientific research through continuous integration and continuous deployment. This presentation will share the results focusing on challenges and opportunities to the adoption of DevOps. Additionally, data, use cases, and best practices from top universities around the world will be shared.