Business Maturity on DevOps Model

(This blog contains information about what is DevOps at its core and its maturity model and how It adds value in Business.)

To match the market’s demands, brands are adopting a DevOps culture to streamline the development, deployment, management and maintenance of software at scale. DevOps is a set of cultural principles centred on the concepts of cross-fertilising expertise between software development and infrastructure operations.

“DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.”

“Dev” is used as shorthand for developers in particular, but really in practice it is even wider and means “all the people involved in developing the product”. 

Some folks thinks that DevOps means that developers are taking over operations and doing it themselves. Part of that is true and part of it isn’t. Now, as we realise some parts of operations need to be automated, that means that either ops people do some automation development, or developers are writing “operations” code, or both. It is the overall collaborative approach. 

Work done by DevOps team

 ? Develop and test against production-like systems 

? Deploy with repeatable, reliable processes 

? Monitor and validate operational quality 

? Amplify feedback loops 

 DevOps provides ability to dynamically and continuously provision infrastructure resources (hardware and/ or software components) for developers and testers to rapidly obtain production-like environments without waiting days/weeks for a manual request to be fulfilled and so that they can see how the application behaves and performs well before it’s ready for deployment.

Skill set of successful DevOps Team

All the successful teams using this approach should have people with deep dev skill sets as well as deep operations skill sets working together to create a better overall product. Technical skills are being expert in scripting languages (Python, Ruby, Java, Java script, PHP, Bash, Shell, and Node.js etc.) and automation tools (Chef, Puppet, GIT, Ansible, Fabric, Jenkins etc.).

Team should be up to date with latest developments happening in cloud and virtualisation domain (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Mesos, Swarm, docker etc.).

Software security skills like compliance monitoring, threat investigation, vulnerability management are mandatory skills as you do not want to fix security issues in code; you want to predict and eliminate them from the start. 

Apart from this, DevOps team should nurture soft skills like passion, proactivity, curiosity, flexibility, self-motivation, empathy, communication and collaboration….Too much? Yes, and then good speed and stress management, That’s all!

 DevOps Maturity Model

To measure your DevOps team along a gradient of maturity vs. a superficial “are we DevOps or not?” perspective, answer the yes or no questions below: 

(A) Culture: Empathetic/Adaptive

• Can your developers deploy (safely) to production? YES 
• Are your developers on call? YES 
• Do your sysadmins understand the intent of the code in production? YES 
• Do your testers write automated tests? YES 
• Do your product managers deploy experiments? YES 
• Could you drop everything and deliver something completely new in a week? YES 
• Do you believe that “reaching compliance” is a good indicator of quality? NO 
• Do you attribute outages to “human error”? NO 
• Do you believe in a single root cause of incidents? NO 
• Is there a climate of transparency ? A culture of failure acceptance ? YES 
• Are we user centric ? Are our decisions taken form the customer perspectives ? YES 
• Do we try to improve our practices regularly ? Can we delete the wastes of time ? YES 
• Do we master the processes ? YES 
• Are we focused on technical excellence ? YES 
• Are tests and security left-shifted in the life cycle ? YES 

(B) Practices: Continuous Everything – build, test, integration, delivery, deployment, monitoring >> Automate Everything

• Can you push a button and run a full regression test suite against your system? YES 
• Can you push a button and deploy (safely) to production? YES 
• Can you deploy more than five times a day? YES 
• Can you measure the technical quality and user impact (positive or negative) of a feature? YES 
• Can you measure the evolving quality of a feature before it’s “done”? YES 
• Can you run a controlled experiment to test a business or design hypothesis? YES 
• Can your management team defines, collects, mixes & analyses technical / business / product metrics? YES

Recognising the Business Value of DevOps 

 DevOps provides significant Business return on investment in three areas: 

? Enhanced customer experience 

? Increased capacity to innovate 

? Faster time to value

According to Grand View Research, “The global DevOps market size is expected to reach USD 12.85 billion by 2025.”. These statistics demonstrate the rising adoption of cloud technologies, digitation of enterprises to automate business processes and soaring adoption of agile frameworks. To make Dev Ops philosophy a reality and to be with the speed of the industry, your organisation must have a vision of the target and should start with bottom up approach. Do share your comments how you want to achieve your targets and what are the real bottle necks in your business.

#cloudcomputing #businessautomation #devops