In a variety of surveys conducted by organizations for their State of DevOps reports, including Puppet, RedGate, and more, most reported that around 70-80% of organizations have adopted DevOps practices for at least some elements of development. In a different survey, the Harvard Business Review noted that over 80% of organizations understand the importance of DevOps in work. As the cherry on top, the global business market is expected to surpass 50 billion USD in the coming years. So, it goes without saying that starting or continuing a DevOps transformation journey should be a top priority for most organizations.
DevOps, when implemented correctly, is a cultural shift that focuses on collaboration, automation, and integration throughout the software development lifecycle. And, as evidenced by the metrics above, DevOps continues to deliver numerous advantages to organizations across industries. It can result in improved software quality, faster time-to-market, stronger company culture, collaborative teams, continuous integration and delivery, and much more.
However, understanding the value of something and implementing it are two very different things, especially at the organizational level. At the same time, the initial investment and challenges are more than worth the investment when it comes to DevOps implementation. Based on our experience working with clients to implement DevOps transformations, here at Ceiba Software we’ve put together a comprehensive, yet reasonable DevOps transformation guide to start, continue, or finalize your DevOps adoption journey. Let’s get started!
1. Identify the current state of your DevOps adoption
Before embarking on a DevOps transformation, assess your organization’s current stage of DevOps maturity. Are you just starting your journey? Have you started to implement CI/CD? Are you working on shifting cultural perceptions? Evaluate which, and to what extent, DevOps principles and practices are already in place across your teams. This includes the maturity of your automation, collaboration between development and operations teams, and your current tools and processes.
Start by conducting an internal audit to identify areas of strength and weakness. If you feel like you have a start on DevOps adoption, you can use a DevOps Maturity Model assessment to gauge your DevOps maturity more specifically and identify what steps you need to take to improve your maturity level. If you have just started your DevOps transformation process, you have come to the right place!
2. Align with business stakeholders and business objectives
A successful DevOps transformation does not happen in a vacuum and must align with the broader business goals. DevOps is not just a technical initiative, rather it is a cultural and strategic shift that delivers numerous results, including faster time-to-market, improved product quality, and increased customer satisfaction. More than likely, these benefits will support the organization’s business goals, but it’s important to take it one step further.
Engage with business stakeholders to understand their priorities and challenges. Then, align the goals of your DevOps initiative with specific business outcomes, creating a shared vision and a comprehensive DevOps transformation roadmap. This buy-in is crucial for driving organizational support and ensuring that your transformation efforts deliver tangible business value.
4. Build out a strategy and transformation plan
Once you’ve assessed your current state of DevOps, aligned with stakeholders, and identified a CoE, it’s time to build a roadmap for your DevOps transformation. This roadmap should include specific goals, timelines, and milestones for implementing DevOps practices, tools, and cultural shifts. Set clear, realistic phases for your transformation! If you have a DevOps maturity model, this can be a great framework to follow as it outlines the key phases to achieving DevOps maturity. DORA, a research program run by Google Cloud committed to helping organizations transform, can be a very valuable resource as well!
This is a great opportunity to pull in partners or vendors with more experience in DevOps and complete projects with them to drive real-world understanding and incentives. You can always choose to start with small projects or pilot teams, then expand DevOps practices across larger segments of the organization.
5. Select the right tools
Aside from the cultural aspect of DevOps, DevOps tools are considered a very important element of a successful DevOps transformation. Ultimately, DevOps success hinges on selecting the right tools for your unique environment and objectives. Tooling should support collaboration, automation, continuous integration, delivery, and monitoring. Your initial tech stack should be used to automate infrastructure delivery before becoming more sophisticated and moving into the realm of platform engineering.
Some key tool categories to consider:
- Version control – Git, Bitbucket, AWS CodeCommit
- Build automation – Jenkins, GitLab CI, Apache Maven
- Testing frameworks – Selenium, JUnit
- Containerization – Docker, Kubernetes
- Monitoring and alerting – Prometheus, Grafana
The chosen tools should integrate smoothly into your existing infrastructure and meet your team’s skill sets and needs. It might be worthwhile to hire a partner with working knowledge in some of these areas to make adopting and implementing performance and automation tools much faster and more efficient.
6. Build robust CI/CD pipelines
Central to the technical aspect of DevOps is the Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, which automates the building, testing, and deploying of applications. Creating a robust, automated pipeline reduces human error, accelerates release cycles, and ensures code quality.
Your CI/CD pipeline should include:
- Automated builds and tests: Ensure that every code change triggers an automatic test suite.
- Code quality checks: Include static code analysis, security scans, and performance testing.
- Automated deployment: Ensure that tested code can be deployed to staging or production environments with minimal manual intervention.
This step in your transformation journey may take some time! It is almost guaranteed that you will face challenges during your DevOps transformation. Sometimes those challenges will be people-focused and sometimes they will be tech-focused. Implementing CI/CD pipelines can hit on both of those challenges as people get used to the evolving development process and tools. Additionally, you will have to ensure teams have the correct resources available to complete new pipelines, such as multiple environments and integrated security software, and are also able to update existing pipelines. Take your time here and call on the experts if needed! It can be worth an initial monetary investment to save time and prevent spiraling problems.
7. Measure the right performance metrics
How do you know you’re succeeding in your DevOps transformation? Metrics, of course! Measuring the right performance metrics is essential for monitoring progress and ensuring continuous improvement. Some key metrics to track include:
- Deployment frequency: How often are you deploying code to production?
- Lead time for changes: How long does it take to go from code committed to code deployed?
- Mean time to recovery (MTTR): How quickly can your team recover from a production issue?
- Change failure rate: What percentage of changes result in a failure?
These metrics help highlight areas for improvement, support data-driven decision-making, and show the impact of DevOps practices on business performance, tying everything back to the broader business objectives.
8. Culture is key!
DevOps is as much about people and processes as it is about tools. Building a DevOps culture of collaboration, transparency, and shared ownership is critical to success.
To do this, encourage cross-functional collaboration between development, operations, security, and QA teams. Break down silos by promoting shared goals, mutual accountability, and open communication. Finally, work on fostering a learning environment where mistakes and problems are viewed as opportunities to improve, and continuous experimentation is encouraged. This is by far the hardest and longest part of the journey because it has to do with organizational structure and culture, and most importantly, people.
9. Feeling stuck? Remember; it’s a journey
DevOps is a continuous journey, not a race to the finish line or an easy-to-assemble, out-of-the-box solution. Take time with your teams to reflect on what’s working and what needs improvement, and leave no stone unturned. Make sure to conduct retrospectives after major milestones, or at regular intervals, and foster a culture of transparency and a commitment to continuous learning. Use the feedback to evolve your practices and iterate on your DevOps strategy, recognizing that it may be a long journey fraught with DevOps transformation challenges. At the end of the day, you will make mistakes, but as long as you and your teams are willing to keep moving forward and evolving your strategy, your DevOps transformation will progress.
If you’re feeling stuck, consider contracting an experienced partner to accelerate your transformation and provide expert guidance. During a DevOps transformation, sometimes you just need an experienced partner to point out quick wins and help you navigate the complexities of DevOps, from tool selection to cultural change. It can even relieve some of the stress and burden of the transformation from your teams if you hire a DevOps expert for training or support.
Just make sure to ensure that the partner you choose aligns with your organization’s goals, has deep expertise, and offers a collaborative approach to implementing DevOps practices, so your team is learning as well.
Feel free to reach out to us to explore how we can help you on your journey.
