How to Create a Dev Ops Strategy for Your Organization
DevOps is a set of practices that aims to improve the collaboration and communication between software development and IT operations teams. DevOps also emphasizes automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and feedback loops. By adopting DevOps, organizations can deliver software faster, more reliably, and with higher quality.
However, implementing DevOps is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each organization has its own goals, challenges, and culture. Therefore, it is important to create a DevOps strategy that aligns with your specific needs and context. Here are some steps to help you create a DevOps strategy for your organization, along with some examples of how other organizations have done it:
1. Assess your current state. Before you can plan your DevOps journey, you need to understand where you are now. You can use various tools and frameworks to assess your current maturity level, such as the DevOps Assessment Framework (DAF), the DevOps Capability Assessment (DOCA), or the DevOps Maturity Model (DMM). These tools can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as the gaps and opportunities for improvement. For example, Netflix used the DAF to measure their DevOps performance across four dimensions: culture, automation, measurement, and sharing. They found that they excelled in automation and measurement, but needed to improve in culture and sharing.
2. Define your vision and goals. Once you have a clear picture of your current state, you need to define your vision and goals for DevOps. What are the benefits you want to achieve? How will you measure your success? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to you? Some common DevOps goals include reducing deployment time, increasing deployment frequency, improving customer satisfaction, and enhancing security and compliance. For example, Amazon set a goal to deploy code every 11.6 seconds on average, which enabled them to deliver new features and updates faster and more frequently to their customers.
3. Identify your stakeholders and champions. DevOps is not just a technical change, but also a cultural and organizational change. Therefore, you need to involve and engage all the relevant stakeholders and champions in your DevOps strategy. Stakeholders are the people who are affected by or have an interest in your DevOps initiative, such as developers, testers, operations staff, managers, customers, and vendors. Champions are the people who are passionate about DevOps and can influence others to adopt it. You need to communicate with your stakeholders and champions regularly, solicit their feedback, address their concerns, and celebrate their achievements. For example, Spotify created a network of DevOps coaches who helped teams adopt DevOps practices and tools.
4. Choose your tools and practices. DevOps is not about using a specific tool or following a specific practice. Rather, it is about choosing the tools and practices that best suit your needs and context. There are many tools and practices available for DevOps, such as version control systems, configuration management tools, testing frameworks, monitoring tools, collaboration platforms, agile methodologies, lean principles, etc. You need to evaluate the options based on criteria such as functionality, compatibility, scalability, security, cost, and ease of use. You also need to ensure that your tools and practices are integrated and aligned with each other. For example, Google developed their own set of tools and practices for DevOps, such as Borg (a cluster management system), Monarch (a monitoring system), Blaze (a build system), Gerrit (a code review tool), etc.
5. Implement and iterate. After you have chosen your tools and practices, you need to implement them in your organization. However, implementing DevOps is not a one-time event, but rather an ongoing process of learning and improvement.
You need to monitor your progress using the KPIs you defined earlier, collect feedback from your stakeholders and champions, identify issues and bottlenecks, and make adjustments as needed.
You also need to foster a culture of experimentation and innovation in your organization, where failures are seen as opportunities for learning and growth.
For example, Facebook adopted a motto of "move fast and break things", which encouraged their engineers to experiment with new ideas and learn from their mistakes.
Summary:
- DevOps is a set of practices that improves the collaboration and communication between software development and IT operations teams.
- To create a DevOps strategy for your organization, you need to assess your current state, define your vision and goals, identify your stakeholders and champions, choose your tools and practices, and implement and iterate.
- Creating a DevOps strategy requires technical, cultural, and organizational changes that can bring significant benefits to your organization.