DevOps Adoption Strategies: Principles, Processes, Tools, and Trends

Martyn Coupland

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781801078788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Aplicaciones empresariales

Gain in-depth insight into DevOps relative to your field of expertise and implement effective DevOps culture and processes within your organizationKey Features• Packed with step-by-step explanations and practical examples to help you get started with DevOps• Develop the skills and knowledge you need to tackle the deployment of DevOps tools• Discover technology trends such as FinOps and DevSecOps to get more value from DevOpsBook DescriptionDevOps is a set of best practices enabling operations and development teams to work together to produce higher-quality work and, among other things, quicker releases. This book helps you to understand the fundamentals needed to get started with DevOps, and prepares you to start deploying technical tools confidently. You will start by learning the key steps for implementing successful DevOps transformations. The book will help you to understand how aspects of culture, people, and process are all connected, and that without any one of these elements DevOps is unlikely to be successful. As you make progress, you will discover how to measure and quantify the success of DevOps in your organization, along with exploring the pros and cons of the main tooling involved in DevOps. In the concluding chapters, you will learn about the latest trends in DevOps and find out how the tooling changes when you work with these specialties. By the end of this DevOps book, you will have gained a clear understanding of the connection between culture, people, and processes within DevOps, and learned why all three are critically important.What you will learn• Understand the importance of culture in DevOps• Build, foster, and develop a successful DevOps culture• Discover how to implement a successful DevOps framework• Measure and define the success of DevOps transformation• Get to grips with techniques for continuous feedback and iterate process changes• Discover the tooling used in different stages of the DevOps life cycleWho this book is forThis book is for IT professionals such as support engineers and systems engineers and developers looking to learn DevOps and for those going through DevOps transformation. General knowledge of IT and business processes will be helpful. You'll also find this book useful if you are in a business or service role within technology such as service delivery management. Basic familiarity with DevOps and transformational methods such as value streams and process are needed to get the most out of this book.

Section 1: Principles of DevOps and Agile

In this section, you will gain a working understanding of the basics involved in DevOps, including the benefits, pitfalls, and tooling.

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Introducing DevOps and Agile
• Chapter 2, Business Benefits, Team Topologies, and the Pitfalls of DevOps
• Chapter 3, Measuring the Success of DevOps

Chapter 1: Introducing DevOps and Agile

In this chapter, we'll introduce DevOps and Agile. We'll explore a few questions, including What does DevOps set out to achieve?, and How does Agile play a part in DevOps?. We'll also explore the values of a successful DevOps transformation and the challenges that DevOps solves for organizations. We will also learn how to build the four phases of DevOps maturity.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

• Exploring the goals of DevOps
• Values associated with DevOps
• Challenges solved by DevOps
• Phases of DevOps maturity
• How does Agile play a part in DevOps?

Exploring the goals of DevOps

The subject of DevOps is one that tends to prompt many different opinions on what it means and exactly how you do DevOps within your organization. The goals of DevOps and what it helps you achieve within your organization is also something that you will get different answers for from different people, depending on their experience, the industry they work in, and how successful those organizations have been at adopting DevOps.

For many organizations, you can define the following common goals of DevOps. These are goals that apply to most organizations:

• Deployment frequency
• Faster time to market
• Lower failure rates
• Shorter lead times
• Improved recovery time

Of course, your organization may be driven by different reasons and even for similar organizations, I would expect their goals to be slightly different. After all, while most organizations share the same challenges, how these challenges can be addresses and which of these challenges will result in the biggest gain in value will also differ, depending on the organization.

Deployment frequency

Improving the frequency at which you release or deploy software in your organization is often a key driver of the adoption of DevOps. We must start to change the way we collaborate and communicate within our organization to deliver value to our end users.

When developers and operations teams start focusing on the same shared goals, they start working together more effectively and deliver better value.

Faster time to market

Most organizations will compete with another for the services they provide. Having a faster time to market gives you a competitive edge over your competitors. With DevOps, you can work to increase value by reducing the amount of time it takes from idea inception to product release.

As a business, your value degrades the longer it takes you to release features to your product and the quicker your competition can get ahead of you. So, achieving a faster time to market is a key goal of not just DevOps but the business as well.

Lower failure rates

Every organization has failures, but with DevOps, you can, over time, expect to realize lower failure rates through teams collaborating with each other and communicating better with each other.

Tip

Cross-functional in DevOps denotes where people from different areas work together in one team.

DevOps gives teams the ability to work more closely and communicate more effectively. In mature organizations, it allows for cross-functional teams. The shared knowledge between these teams and the individuals within them and the greater understanding of each other's roles leads to lower failure rates.

Shorter lead times

Lead time is the amount of time between the initiation and completion of a specific task. In DevOps, this would be the amount of time between work starting on a user story and that story making it to release.

Tied hand in hand with faster time to market, shorter lead times is not just about your product but everything in the whole life cycle. This could be anything from planning where you capture requirements more effectively all the way to building infrastructure quicker than before.

Through slick processes, effective communication and collaboration, and high levels of automation, the lead times throughout your cycle will be quicker, leading to high performance within your team.

Improved recovery time

Of course, we all know that most organizations have Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) to measure the performance of key service-based metrics such as availability. However, how many organizations can tell you, on average, how long it takes to recover a service? Not many.

Having the level of collaboration that lets you discuss the reasons behind failures, understand them, and implement steps to prevent them from happening again is a sign of a mature organization. An organization that measures this metrics and takes steps to reduce them is an even more mature organization.

Downtime is lost revenue and reputational damage to your organization, so reducing that level of downtime is very important.

In this section, we have explored what the key goals of DevOps are and the business value behind the adoption of DevOps. Next, we'll take this further by looking at the values that make DevOps successful.

Values associated with DevOps

DevOps can be split into various pillars when it comes to transformation. That being said, if you wanted to take a high-level view of DevOps rather than one at a deeper level, you can talk about DevOps as four specific buckets.

These buckets are as follows:

• Culture
• People
• Process
• Technology

I firmly believe the order of these matters. While the ambition may be to work on tooling first, following the order set out here will ensure your organizations get much more value from their DevOps transformation.

Important note

Culture is one of the most important aspects of a successful DevOps transformation, even above the use of technology.

The importance of culture in DevOps cannot be overstated; getting the right culture in your organization enables you to drive in the right direction and get more value later in the transformation. You should also not underestimate the challenge of changing an organization's culture – it requires drive and executive-level support to be successful.

Next is people, the lifeblood of any business and any product. You must ensure that you have the right people to get the right culture to achieve the goals that have been set out by your organization, and those people must have the right skills to achieve this. As important as executive-level support is to DevOps, so is having the right people to execute it.

Now, we have process. The right-minded people will be the ones who can work with and drive your processes in the right direction, applying appropriate techniques to ensure your processes are fit for purpose in a DevOps world. To work together, you need to adopt some processes for continuous collaboration, such as plan, develop, release, and monitor. Finally, you need the ability to repeat those processes on demand to deliver maximum value.

Finally, technology. By this point, the work you have undertaken in your DevOps transformation should have gained incredible value for your organization, but by introducing technology, you can add yet more value. Through automation tools, your processes can now be run on demand, more frequently, and, importantly, with a level of idempotency. This means that results with the same input parameters should not change over time. This is the value automation brings over human execution.

In this section, we have looked at the values that make DevOps successful. Now that we understand what it means to implement DevOps, we will understand the challenges that DevOps will solve in our organization.

Challenges solved by DevOps

DevOps does solve many challenges in organizations. You need to be mindful that many of these challenges have existed for a significant amount of time, have become engrained in how people operate, and that it will take some time to unpick the different levels to achieve what you want to achieve.

Prior to the adoption of DevOps, ...

Table of contents

• DevOps Adoption Strategies: Principles, Processes, Tools, and Trends
• Contributors
• Preface
• Section 1: Principles of DevOps and Agile
• Chapter 1: Introducing DevOps and Agile
• Chapter 2: Business Benefits, Team Topologies, and Pitfalls of DevOps
• Chapter 3: Measuring the Success of DevOps
• Section 2: Developing and Building a Successful DevOps Culture
• Chapter 4: Building a DevOps Culture and Breaking Down Silos
• Chapter 5: Avoiding Cultural Anti-Patterns in DevOps
• Section 3: Driving Change and Maturing Your Processes
• Chapter 6: Driving Process Change with Value Stream Maps
• Chapter 7: Delivering Process Change in Your Organization
• Chapter 8: Continuous Improvement of Processes
• Section 4: Implementing and Deploying DevOps Tools
• Chapter 9: Understanding the Technical Stack for DevOps
• Chapter 10: Developing a Strategy for Implementing Tooling
• Chapter 11: Keeping Up with Key DevOps Trends
• Chapter 12: Implementing DevOps in a Real-World Organization
• Other Books You May Enjoy