10 Steps for DevOps Success
David Linthicum
Enterprises often stumble when moving to DevOps as a better path to cloud application development . The reason is the sheer amount of change that needs to occur , including people , processes , and technology . DevOps and cloud subject matter experts face a huge amount of work to transform organizations to make effective use of DevOps processes and technology .
Here ’ s a 10-step process to help transform your organization to DevOps . We ’ ll cover how to create and deploy an effective DevOps process as well as how to select the right tools .
Steps 1 : Assess Where You Are
Start with an honest assessment of the current state of your processes , technology , and culture . For this process , I use a predefined maturity model ( see Figure 1 ), which allows you a gauge to rank existing people , processes , and technology within the organization . It ’ s best that a third party perform this assessment , because self-assessments tend to be skewed toward the higher levels .
Step 2 : Assess Where You Need To Go
Level 1 ( ad hoc ) is where most organizations are today , so there ’ s a great deal of work to be done . At this level , the organization is silo-based , typically uses blame as a way to get things done , has experts that don ’ t share knowledge , and has almost no accountability . As far as technology , IT does manual building and deployment , as well as manual testing . The development , testing , and deployment environments are inconsistent .
Level 5 ( optimized ) has a culture of continuous improvement . This includes zero downtime deployment , immutable infrastructure , and an active focus on resiliency . Few organizations are at this point in the emergence of DevOps , although this is the objective . This is where you need to go if you ’ re not there already .
Step 3 : Define a DevOps Organization
Defining a DevOps oriented organization is the most significant step , and it ’ s also the most difficult . Many organizations don ’ t understand that this is a systemic change in personnel and processes . As such , if the organization doesn ’ t add the skills needed , or becomes a more loosely defined organization , the project fails .
It ’ s during this step that the organization needs to assess what it has in terms of skills . This skills assessment forms an understanding of the “ as is ” and the “ to be ” desired state , determines the existing gaps , and identifies the plans that will fill in those gaps .
Most envision layoffs as part of a reorganization around DevOps , but it ’ s primarily a matter of retraining . After completing retraining , you need to figure out how each skill fits in with the emerging DevOps processes .
10 | THE DOPPLER | WINTER 2016