How can I monitor my DevOps journey with a DevOps maturity model?
What is DevOps maturity?
Every well-constructed building was first drawn up as a blueprint. Similarly in DevOps, they use a blueprint called a maturity model. With a well-charted DevOps maturity model, you will know where your project is heading and why. You can also keep track of progress while correcting your course if any interruptions occur.
60% of developers are releasing code 2x faster than before, thanks to DevOps — up 25% from (pre-pandemic) 2020.
72% of security pros rated their organizations’ security efforts as “good” or “strong” — up 13% over 2020.
56% of ops teams members said they are “fully” or mostly automated — up 10% from 2020.
Almost 25% of respondents claimed to have full test automation — up 13% from 2020.
75% of teams are either using AI/ML or bots for test/code review, or they’re planning to — up 41% from 2020.
Source: GitLab’s 2021 Global DevSecOps Survey
Areas of DevOps Maturity
When you are adopting DevOps, you will deal with four areas of the maturity model. They are culture and strategy, testing, automation, and architecture.
Culture and Strategy
When put DevOps ideas together and implement them, they create the DevOps culture. By being part of it, people will naturally start adopting the DevOps mindset. There are many benefits, which can include:
“For me, DevOps is a cultural shift. Developers not only build it, but ship it, and also observe it and monitor it while it’s out in production. So it’s their baby, from birth out into the wild.”
Sean Sullivan — CBT Nuggets
Testing
DevOps practices allow enterprises to release software very quickly — anywhere from every two weeks to many times a day. This means manual testing is not an option if you want to use the speed offered by DevOps. So, test automation software becomes necessary when DevOps reduce the testing cycle time.
Automation
According to market research by Statista , around 35% of the organizations are already using automation tools for their testing procedures and 29% have plans to implement automated strategies and tools for their products. Using automated tools is one of the best ways to save time, improve the quality of your application, and increase productivity. These tools help you to identify security threats and breaks in runtime and prevent you from wasting time with extra restructuring.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
~ Bill Gates
Architecture
DevOps affects architecture by taking into account the needs of Operations. But it is important to understand that there is no one perfect architecture for all products and all scales. Any architecture meets a particular set of goals or range of requirements and constraints, such as time to market, ease of developing functionality, or scaling.
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Four stages of DevOps Maturity Journey
DevOps is not a single technology, tool, process, or person. It is a journey, and for large organizations it can be a difficult and long one.
Stage One — DevOps Denial and Misinterpretation — Chaos: There is no automation. Or, hacked-together, un-monitored scripts run loose in your environment. Each team does their own thing. At this Unconscious Incompetence stage, a lack of understanding about what DevOps is and what its business benefits are will cause that you to deny the usefulness of DevOps and write it off as a kind of fad or bad marketing term.
Stage Two — Automation for the Sake of Automation — Manual: There are steps, but most include manual intervention. Whether it is running a script or manually moving files around, your people are the process. This Conscious Incompetence stage usually lasts for the first 12 to 18 months of an organization’s DevOps journey.
From here, many organizations grab onto the automation aspects of DevOps and start madly writing Chef scripts to automate everything and anything. My recommendation is to make the process of automation a slow step-by-step progression.
Stage Three — Collaboration and Reorganization — Managed: This can be considered the easy stage. This could mean that deploys require someone to approve or push a button. At this stage, you already understand that DevOps is more than engineers and scripts. It is all about improving the entire software development lifecycle, from business idea inception to production. This Conscious Competence stage usually lasts from years two to four.
Stage Four — A High Performing Organization — Self-Service: Applications, data, and infrastructure are self-service. At this Unconscious Competence stage, you will deploy multiple times a day with certainty and minimal risk.
As you move through the stages of learning, each stage provides more business value to your company. The speed at which a business moves is increasing exponentially. Look at the technologies that are driving the future: AI, machine learning, block chain and IoT.
When you have entered Stage Four maturity, you will be able to use these technologies to bring out solutions faster than your competitors, creating even more separation in marketplace. My advice is to either embrace DevOps and start transforming your organization or go out of business.
DevOps Maturity for Applications
The longer applications are in a development or test environment, the more difficult they will be to deploy in production. These longer processes require more manual steps that increase the opportunities for human errors to occur. This is not down to bad programmers or individual mistakes; this is probability. When you add uncertainty, you increase the chances that something will go wrong. How do you measure the maturity of your application?
This is valuable to review. How many of the following practices do you have automated in your delivery pipeline?
DevOps Maturity for Infrastructure
Have you ever worked in an environment where it took months to set up a virtual machine for a new project? Or even worse, have you seen infrastructure changes that brought everything to crashes and stops, but the team cannot undo it because everything was created manually? This is why it is valuable to have DevOps in your team. Their automated processes allow you to withdraw to previous versions of the program if something goes wrong.
DevOps Maturity for Data
I have seen many companies that like to skip the data aspect of DevOps. “It’s too difficult. The data is stateful! You can’t automate,” they exclaim. You might suspect that DevOps can also help improve this. You are right! DevOps, or DataOps for data, is a growing field of opportunity. The idea here is to find ways to automatically change the data.
DevOps Maturity for Enterprise
The effect DevOps has on the entire enterprise. Without a holistic view, DevOps cannot solve every problem. As mentioned earlier, measurements need to be automated.
Does the idea of deploying something into production on Friday afternoon frighten you? Do you have a sense of fear when you think of all the potential disasters that might affect your customers suddenly throughout the weekend? It is good to have this fear, this keeps you alert! But what you have to do next is determine what the truth beyond fear is. Then you can solve it. What benefits can automation give you? Start listing them. Congratulations, you just found some good places to start your DevOps maturity journey!
Helen Chuchak