DevOps is becoming an essential approach for software teams looking to accelerate delivery, improve quality, and enhance collaboration between development and operations. Implementing DevOps can seem daunting, but following a strategic plan can set your organization up for a successful adoption. In this article, we’ll walk through a seven-step approach to planning and executing a DevOps transformation.
Step 1: Align on Goals and Outcomes
Before making any changes with the help of DevOps implementation services, it’s important to start by aligning your team on the goals and desired outcomes of adopting DevOps. Some questions to define include:
- What challenges is our organization looking to solve? Speed? Quality? Collaboration?
- What key metrics will we use to measure the success of the DevOps implementation? Reduced lead time? Faster recovery time? Improved deployment frequency?
- Who are the critical stakeholders we need to involve in the process? Development managers? Operations leaders? QA? Security?
Gaining alignment early not only ensures leadership support but also helps maintain focus as you work through the details of tactical implementation. Review goals often as new challenges emerge throughout your transition.
Step 2: Assess Current Capabilities
Once goals are defined, conducting an objective assessment of your current capabilities is crucial to highlighting the biggest barriers to achieving improved productivity, reliability, and faster cycle time. This assessment examines three key areas:
Evaluate Existing Toolchain
Take stock of what tools are currently being used across the software development lifecycle – for code, build, testing, release, infrastructure automation, monitoring etc. Make a list of all tools and platforms, both commercial and open source. Identify major gaps where lack of consistency or automation is slowing down delivery speed or reducing quality. For example, perhaps testing is still largely manual due to a lack of test automation frameworks. Deployments are error-prone because they rely on tedious manual steps across disparate systems. Understanding automation gaps informs priority areas to tackle that will provide quick wins.
Assess Processes
Document exactly how work gets done currently across product delivery, deployment, release, and incident response processes. Catalog each step required in workflows and identify areas of waste, inefficiency or places where handoffs create bottlenecks. For example, are developers waiting on ops teams for production access? Are there too many manual hand-offs between functional siloes to coordinate a release? Process inefficiencies reveal where to target process improvements and realign incentives toward customer-focused outcomes vs functional silo metrics.
Analyze Organizational Structures
Look at how roles and teams are structured. Pinpoint places where rigid separation of responsibilities between developers, operations, QA, InfoSec and other groups causes delays. For example, separate ops teams cause ticket queues and multi-week delays vs developers deploying independently. Examine where incentives differ by function, as opposed to shared goals around user experience. Breaking down structural divides and enabling shared responsibility becomes pivotal.
Conducting an accurate assessment in these areas brings the highest leverage opportunities into focus for where to start. The areas of greatest pain become evident priorities for process, tooling and organizational change. This data-driven understanding sets the foundation for a realistic roadmap.
Step 3: Create Implementation Roadmap
With goals aligned and current capabilities assessed, map out a phased implementation roadmap focused on incrementally driving DevOps outcomes over time. Attempting a full organizational transformation all at once is less likely to succeed.
- Start small – Run pilot projects in lower risk areas to test approaches before scaling. Front-end web apps or non-customer facing backends are often good candidates.
- Prioritize toolchain automation – Tackle gaps in source control, building, testing and deployment first. Developer self-service and automation provides quick wins.
- Evolve culture and process – Coaching, workshops and process changes take longer to adopt. Introduce cultural elements methodically once early automation gains traction.
Continually review the roadmap to align on the next priorities. Expect challenges and be willing to adjust the course as learnings and constraints emerge.
Step 4: Introduce Automation and Tooling
One pivotal early investment in DevOps is introducing automation into the software delivery lifecycle to increase consistency, efficiency, and reliability.
Automate infrastructure – Make infrastructure programmable and repeatable using “infrastructure as code” practices. Common tooling includes Terraform, CloudFormation and Ansible.
Standardize environments – Standardize base images, configuration templates and environment definitions through tooling like Packer, Docker and Vagrant.
Embrace CI/CD – Adopt continuous integration and continuous delivery capabilities early through open source tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI or TeamCity.
Start small, demonstrate benefits through measurable outcomes around lead time, recovery time and safety, then expand automation efforts.
Step 5: Transform Culture and Process
While improved tooling provides the necessary foundation, truly achieving DevOps requires transforming processes, culture and team structures. This level of change takes time and disciplined effort to drive sustainable change.
- Break down siloes – Bring developers, ops, and test together – structurally, process-wise, and culturally – through tactics like merged teams, shared goals around customer value, collective code ownership, blameless post-mortems etc.
- Emphasize learning and experimentation – Accept failures will happen when experimenting and learn quickly through techniques like blameless post-mortems. Allow time for learning via hackathons, innovation days, or 20% of project time.
- Enable collaboration – Drive transparency of work and continual feedback loops between teams through practices like daily standups, planning sessions, retrospectives, and more.
Enable cultural change through coaching teams, providing training, modifying performance criteria, and visibly rewarding desired behaviors.
Step 6: Optimize Feedback Loops
Getting fast and continual feedback is what allows DevOps teams to accelerate learning and improvement. Without rapid feedback on changes introduced, teams are left flying blind, unable to course correct issues before they turn into downstream disruptions.
Think of it this way – would you rather learn that a code update you introduced last week is causing crashes for customers today or be alerted to performance problems the minute they start occurring? The former means angry customers and scramble to remediate. The latter allows fixing it before most people even noticed.
Optimizing feedback loops is about continually shortening the cycles, automating notifications, and facilitating rapid response so teams can catch problems emerging early.
For example, expanding automated testing coverage through unit and integration testing provides feedback on code changes within hours. Performance testing simulates user scenarios to reveal scaling or reliability issues. Shift left testing pushes validation earlier into development lifecycles.
Observability techniques like application monitoring and aggregated logging dashboards make the health of complex systems transparent. Errors and anomalies pop out immediately without needing to dig through logs.
Enabling rapid recovery when problems do occur is also key. The easiest way to do this is building in redundancy and automated failover so when one component dies, traffic instantly shifts elsewhere without human intervention. Chaos testing – purposely injecting failures into production – reveals weaknesses in fault tolerance.
The ultimate goal becomes learning about anything going wrong in production the same instant it occurs and having automated remediation kick into self-heal without impacting customers. This real-time optimization capability lets teams focus on innovation velocity instead of firefighting.
Step 7: Continually Improve and Optimize
The concluding stage centers on creating a culture that values persistent enhancement and learning. Compile as much data as you can and share it openly to facilitate reality-informed actions and growth.
- Improve metrics – Monthly check metrics to be confident they shed significant light and instigate the correct responses. Shun data points seem important but do not support company aims.
- Hold retrospectives without assigning blame to investigate what succeeded and what did not, along with proposing solutions. Establish talks on harmonized aims and real data rather than personal preferences.
- Automating deployment efforts strengthens stability and provides developers additional time. Standardize the tools used and check safety measures while allowing self-service access.
- Eliminate technical debt – Don’t permit outdated technical debt to rise. Give engineering teams the chance to focus on repaying debt and enhancing infrastructure.
Sustain transformational energy by continually reinforcing culture, evaluating processes, and optimizing the efficiency of the delivery pipeline. DevOps is not a one-time event but rather an ongoing journey.
Conclusion
Adopting DevOps can enable tremendous improvements in productivity, stability and innovation capability for technology driven teams. But driving these outcomes doesn’t happen overnight. It requires diligent up front planning and phased execution focused on incremental progress vs overnight transformation.
While the tactics will differ for every organization, following a structured approach of aligning on goals, assessing the current state, creating a roadmap, phasing in automation, evolving culture and optimizing feedback loops can provide a strategic framework tailored to your context.
Approach DevOps as a continual journey vs a one time event. Expect challenges as old ways of working get disrupted. Maintain visible leadership support. And continue reinforcing the cultural norms allowing DevOps to take root through metrics, incentives and fostering learning.
With consistent drive, the substantial benefits of DevOps – improved speed to market, quality, safety and ability to innovate – can become reality.
