Best Practices for Adopting a DevOps Culture

DevOps is fast becoming a vital part of many company cultures for a number of very good reasons.

However, implementing DevOps in your organization isn’t as simple as buying a tool and mandating that everyone use it. DevOps is more than a job title or even a team of resources: it’s a culture of constant innovation. A journey that requires continuous, incremental improvement. Daunting? Yes. Worth it? Most definitely.

DevOps is a necessary foundation that enables you to innovate, learn, and improve to drive your business forward.

The Dora State of DevOps 2019 report identifies solid metrics to help benchmark progress towards a DevOps transformation.

• Deployment frequency — How often do you deploy code to production or release it to end-users?
• Lead time for changes — How long does it take to go from code committed to code successfully running in production?
• Time to restore service — How long does it take to restore service when a service incident or defect that impacts users occurs; like an unplanned outage or service impairment?
• Change failure rate — What percentage of changes to production or released to users result in degraded service, and then requires remediation, like a hotfix, rollback, fix forward, or patch?

People, Process and Technology — In That Order

Focus on a DevOps-Ready Platform

• Platform as a Service — Does your infrastructure provide a service catalog of pre-defined capabilities to promote simplicity and supportability?
• Developer Productivity — Do your dev teams have standardized productivity and automation tools so they can focus on app development?
• Built-in Security — Are your orchestration tools embedded with security checks?
• Hybrid Cloud — Can Kubernetes be deployed with ease in on-premises or in the public cloud?

Now, It’s Time to Walk the Talk

• Sell the vision — Who will DevOps service? What services will you provide? How does DevOps fit into the application strategy? What are the expected business outcomes?
• Promote cultural change — Address conflicting priorities between dev and ops head-on. Root the goal of the DevOps transformation in a shared commitment that everyone can get behind. Automate first — find some quick wins. Speed is good, automation reduces risk.
• Deliver results — Build a team with the right skills. Set milestones and deliver real DevOps capabilities against them. Create governance and continuing operating model.

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