Essential Building Blocks of a DevOps Approach

DevOps is not simply a technology stack. It’s an approach that combines cultural philosophies, organizational change, and the implementation of new tools and practices.

This sounds like a mammoth undertaking, but let’s break it down into six understandable building blocks.

1. Small Teams, Full Ownership
2. Automated Tests for Continuous Feedback
3. Loosely-Coupled Architectures
4. Telemetry for Feedback on Apps in Production
5. Continuous Organization-wide Learning
6. DevSecOps: Building Security into Your DevOps Approach

To implement a successful DevOps approach, all the above-mentioned areas are key. While DevOps is all about small teams that work on small functionalities from start to finish, who are encouraged to learn from their mistakes and share them throughout the organization, none of it is possible without the appropriate DevOps toolkit. You’ll need to:

1. Containerize your applications and start refactoring them so they are slowly broken down and decoupled from one another.
2. Build a cloud native infrastructure platform on which your apps will run which allows for on-demand environment creation.
3. Build a deployment pipeline with automated tests to validate code works as planned.
4. Build centralized logging and monitoring tools within all platforms to gather accurate telemetry.

Which leads to the next step, building your enterprise platforms:

• Centralized DevOps Platforms for Increased Dev Productivity
• Kubernetes-Powered On-Demand Production-Like Environments
• Building a Deployment Pipeline or Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

As we have seen, DevOps is about culture change: small groups working on small pieces from start to finish while focusing on global goals. DevOps tools are used to reinforce this culture and accelerate desired behavior. Clearly, a change in human behavior is required. For that to be successful, you’ll need full leadership buy-in and top to bottom reinforcement.

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