Emerging Trend in DevOps

Flow Enablement Platform aka DevOps/DevSecOps Platform

DevOps is an amalgamation of practices, tools, and cultural philosophy that aims to accelerate value delivery; when embedded with security practices and tools, it is referred to as DevSecOps. It is successful when organizations adopt lean-agile ways of working, automation, and continuous improvement. The trends in DevOps are evolving rapidly and continuously & today, we are going to focus on an emerging trend in the DevOps adoption strategy, the DevOps/DevSecOps Platform, that drives Lean "Automation" and "Collaboration" spanning across SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) and enables teams to deliver faster customer value.

DevOps facilitates the acceleration of the flow of value delivery when implemented with an integrated set of shared tools, appropriate guardrails, and built-in quality. The DevOps adoption varies from organization to organization as well as from team to team where organizations have primarily taken two approaches, top-down and bottom-up.???

In a top-down approach, DevOps adoption is centralized. The management decides on the DevOps processes, tools and technologies, and guardrails at the organization level. This approach can lead to team resistance, as they may not feel involved in the decision-making process or because they lack certain skills.

In a bottom-up approach, DevOps adoption is more grassroots. Individual teams implement DevOps practices in isolation. This approach can lead to inconsistency and inefficiencies in the implementation of DevOps practices, due to a lack of centralized guardrails or a plethora of tools increasing the administration/maintenance efforts, and so on.

However, regardless of the approach, the majority fails to meet CxO’s expectations of higher customer value and faster product delivery.

?

According to Gartner, 90% of DevOps initiatives will fail to fully meet expectations through 2023.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/conferences/apac/applications-australia/agenda/featured-topics/topic-devops-agile

?

Although these two approaches are the most common ways for organizations to adopt DevOps, it is not the most ideal. There is a middle-ground approach that combines the best of both worlds i.e., “DevOps/DevSecOps Platform” aka “Platform Engineering” aka “Flow enablement platform” which enables accelerated flow of value by providing a standardized set of integrated tools and processes at the Organization level while providing flexibility to teams to customize the implementation as per their specific needs.

?

Gartner expects that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery.

Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/what-is-platform-engineering

?

Overview of DevOps (or DevSecOps) Platform

The DevOps platform embraces platform engineering, an emerging technology approach that can optimize the platform user experience and accelerate the delivery of applications and business value produced by building and maintaining a platform for use across engineering teams within an organization.

The platform is managed as a product and follows product principles, practices, lifecycle, etc. It is designed, built, and maintained by a team of experts in areas such as security, QA, operations, and development providing self-service capabilities to platform users (i.e., developers, testers, data analysts, end users, etc.) and enabling them to accelerate the flow and delivery of value to their stakeholders.

The platform shall enable:

• Implementation of guardrails around adhered processes, practices, and procedures
• Provision of tools from ideation to delivery, and from monitoring and analytics to automation?
• Flexibility to choose and customize the E2E delivery flow, as per specific needs at the team level within the guardrails.
• Adoption and adherence to best practices via automation (e.g., security practices to secure the platform, workloads, and its environment, infrastructure and operational practices, etc.)
• Usage of templates, reusable artifacts, and knowledge base
• Self-service capabilities for teams to reduce complexities and make it user-friendly (such as through environment provisioning, or CI/CD pipeline creation with minimal to no tweaking)
• Collaboration across Business and IT

?

It provides several efficiencies in the software development process such as:

• Faster time to market – Automating software development, delivery, and maintenance processes speed up the delivery of new features and updates.
• Better quality software – Automated testing and validation tools ensure that software is of high quality.
• Reduced risk – Security practices are integrated into the platform, reducing the risk of vulnerabilities and compliance issues.
• Reliable and scalable environment – The platform team ensures that underlying infrastructure and services are available, responsive, and can handle growing usage.
• Improved End Users Productivity– Centralized management of reusable templates, run book automation, self-heal capabilities, and knowledge management improves the overall productivity of end users and the efficiency of the delivery process.

??

Platform Adoption Options & Criteria

Several players are embracing the new DevOps trend, with new players also entering the market with a focus on providing integrated and managed platform services, thereby accelerating the delivery flow, and enabling SDLC teams to focus on their core responsibilities. The DevOps platform has been evolving fast as a self-service platform, eliminating low-level details, and providing a low-code no-code option to teams. These self-service platforms are bliss for the end users where without having expertise one can self-provision the desired application environment, create an instance of a prebuilt integrated delivery pipeline, and with its low code no code capability one can create a new target environment or new delivery pipeline using existing building blocks with minimal coding and so on.

The organization can opt for DevOps Platform-as-a-Service, or build the platform in-house after completing a thorough evaluation based on specific criteria:

• In-house skills, expertise, and resources
• Legal and regulatory compliance
• Flexibility/customization
• IT system complexities and maturity
• Learning curve
• Integration options
• Administration and management efforts

?

Conclusion

A DevOps/DevSecOps Platform with embedded platform engineering practices that unifies the DevOps/DevSecOps tools, processes, and practices with self-service capabilities, streamlines the end-to-end delivery process, makes it easier for the engineering teams to utilize the right resources with built-in quality, and enables them to focus on their core responsibilities while improving collaboration & minimizing dependencies is the need of an hour.

Organizations must embrace the DevOps/DevSecOps platform to accelerate software delivery with embedded security, enhance team productivity, and achieve consistency and efficiency across the organization