My Take on the IEEE Standard for DevOps (IEEE 2675-2021)
On 16th of April this year, IEEE released its standard for DevOps and earlier last week SEI-CMU hosted a fantastic live session with its lead authors. The session provides a lot of insights into the "why" of such important questions such as "Why DevOps and not DevSecOps" or "Culture", etc. I strongly recommend watching the recording (it is an hour well invested).
For me the most important aspect was that the standard recognizes that to deliver on the ethos of "DevOps" they have considered and addressed a much larger and more pragmatic standard encompassing all the messiness that is modern systems development. This expansive role of the developer is best captured in the image below
(Adapted from "Oh no, DevOps is tough to implement" Presentation by Hasan Yasser, 2018)
So what does the Standard offer?
Huge gripe - NOT A SINGLE DIAGRAM!!! So here is my view of the standard
The standard builds upon existing standards - ISO/IEC/IEEE 12207:2017 and ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288:2015 for the lifecycle process definitions. For each of these processes the standard identifies DevOps related Outcomes, Activities and Tasks. There are
- Agreement Processes - 2 Sub processes
- Organizational Project-Enabling - 6 Sub processes
- Technical Management - 8 Sub processes
- Technical - 14 processes
What I appreciated about the standard is that it is fairly prescriptive about "What" needs to be done - and therefore will allow us to incorporate it into our nuance of SAFe Agile.
What I felt was missing (besides diagrams/images) -
Observability. IMHO, this is one of the most important DevOps capabilities to have been introduced in the last 5 years. This might be because the committee strictly followed the ISO standards which predated the formalization of this capability. It is mentioned as a verb in the Architecture Definition section
Chaos Engineering. Another important capability for operating critical distributed systems is vaguely mentioned in the Risk Management section.
Next Steps (for me/us)
- Assess where we stand (conform) based on this standard
- Design and Planning on increasing our conformance
Enterprise Architect
3 年Great summary and a teaser into the standard. I am curious as to what formal committees like this make out of such a over-hyped and overloaded "practice". Video added to "to watch" bookmark folder :)