DevOps Demystified

DevOps approaches combine development and Operations in order to improve efficiency and quality.

It formed between 2007-2008 when IT operations and software development teams raised concerns about the way their industry was heading. As a result, after much collaboration, the DevOps movement was born. The core principles include:

1. Collaboration

Gone are the silos between developers and operations teams. Both parties now communicate together and appreciate each others constraints and motivations, enabling them to break down hierarchical and structural barriers, enabling them to prioritize and execute to wards common goals.

2. Accountability

Teams now take accountability for the full life-cycle, rather than only being interested in the portion that applies specifically to them. The work is not done until it’s released to a user and value is unlocked.

3. Continuous Improvement

The team works together to review what went well, what could improve, and iteratively apply incremental improvements, resulting in more significant improvements when aggregated over time. This not only improves performance but can also improve team motivation, as teams can see tangible wins regularly, which spurs them on achieve more.

4. Measurement

Just doing work and achieving milestones may not be enough. Measuring team performance helps the team to know where best to apply their time to keep improving.

5. Customer-centred

Focussing less on egos or individual preferences, and prioritizing customer needs helps the team to focus on building and deploying the right scope. Applying a customer-centric lens to decision making also helps with removing unnecessary work and scope.

6. Embrace Failure

I sometimes experienced situations where problems occur and team members either gloss over the root cause, or pass on the responsibility to other teams. DevOps assigns no blame, but instead focusses on learning from failure and actively incorporating the lessons into further product enhancements.

When individuals are afraid of the consequences of failure, they actually fail to take sufficient risks or apply creative thinking, resulting in less customer-centric products, typically delivered at a slower pace to avoid the danger of mistakes.

Video: Attract Group, DevOps Success Stories

7. Automation

Repetitive or laborious tasks can be automated, such as testing, development and deployment, which frees people up to do more intense and specialized work, therefore adding increased value to the team.

This typically involves using automation software, but could also be as simple as setting specific cadence and structure for how certain tasks are done, avoiding wasted time caused by planning the same task every time.

8. Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)

Applying methods that allow for code to be integrated, tested and deployed to users more often is a key to realizing value early and often. This approach also helps the team to learn quickly and make better decisions on scope priority based on user responses.

9. Security Integration (DevSecOps)

Incorporates security practices as an integral part of the overall development process. I’ve experienced teams that have developed credible and useful software, but have fallen short of internal security standards, causing rework and sometimes delayed releases.

Integrating security enables software to be robust and compliant with security standards from the outset.

10. Infrastructure-as-code

Managing and enabling infrastructure through code allows for increased automation and version control, which speeds up the overall process. This differs from physical or interactive hardware configuration, allowing for more consistent and repeatable infrastructure deployment.

Establishing a DevOps approach can be challenging, especially if there is only partial buy-in from the team, department or organization. Here are some approaches to help with adoption and sustained application.

Current State

Find out what the current tools and processes look like and how they are applied. Find out how each team works including the common pitfalls and their successful practices.

Agreement

Make sure to tell the appropriate leadership the benefits of DevOps, overlayed with how it might solve the challenges being faced currently. Be sure to quantify the possible benefits as much as possible.

Once you have agreement, secure the people and ongoing support needed to make the necessary changes.

Culture

It would be relatively straightforward to send out new working principles for people to follow, but the only way to ensure the new approach is being adopted is through mindset changes. This requires everyone involved to be aware of the challenges faced currently, and how the new way of working will help them and their users.

Creating a change of mindset will require regular and consistent communication, sitting with team members in their day-to-day activities and incorporating processes and approaches that enhance how they work.

This might include introducing stand-ups, retrospectives to incorporate lessons, and merging once disparate teams, with shared goals and ownership.

Measure

Start to agree what the common goals and metrics are that will identify success, or otherwise. Hold each other to account for delivering to meaningful objectives.

One of the challenges I’ve faced is that some technologists may not always see how their roles align with business goals and in some instances may not have been informed how important their individual work is to the team or organization’s financial success.

Implement

This will include crucial ways of working such as continuous integration and continuous Delivery (CI/CD), which can involve setting up automated build and test processes, and deployment pipelines.

Adopt infrastructure as code (IaC) including the use of tools such as Terraform.

Automate logging, monitoring and alerting with real-time visibility to improve proactive management.

Not only will buy-in be required from those who can fund these endeavours, engineers should be on board with the approaches, which would require them to first see how beneficial it could be for them.

Secure

Enhance security (DevSecOps) through integrating security checks in the CI/CD processes, including automated security vulnerability scanning and educate team members on their security responsibilities alongside tactics they can use.

Start Small

Start with one team and see where it takes you. Build a backlog of findings and tackle them one by one, celebrating the successes each notable change has made.

When confident of the success, articulate to other teams and expand to each team with sustained communications.

Build a community where each team can share what they are leaning with others, so that teams can help each other and maintain a culture of openness, collaboration and measuring progress.

On line marketplace Etsy was known to implement automated testing as part of changes to streamline their release processes. This involved implementing CI/CD pipelines resulting in increased deployment frequency from twice per week to more than 50 times daily, significantly improving customer experience and responsiveness to change.

Retail giant Target implemented a DevOps culture across their organization, resulting in reduction in deployment times from months to days, increasing deployment frequency by up to 1,800%.

Sports brand Adidas was known to have applied DevOps and cloud migration resulting in reduced infrastructure costs by 35% and a ten-fold increase in deployment speed.

Finance company, Capital One applied DeOps practices reducing development cycles from months to weeks and improving their time-to-market for new features.

The most significant shift I’m aware of is the move to continuous deployment practices at Amazon, enabling them to deploy code roughly every 11.7 seconds, which contributed to the increase their site reliability.

References

DevOps Success stories: Real Life Case Studies

What are DevOps Principles?

What is DevOps?

What is CI/CD?

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