As indicated by the “2016 State-of-DevOps Report,” multiple compelling enterprise business performance improvements provided by well-built DevOps solutions are driving IT transformations for development and operations across many industries.

While some enterprises have implemented DevOps to gain near-term efficiency benefits, DevOps is becoming a competitive essential for all enterprises to implement DevOps. Enterprises that fall behind risk long-term success in their markets. Yet, many organizations are struggling to get DevOps working effectively. What is the secret to success with DevOps?

A solid foundation for DevOps requires mastery of seven areas that we at Trace3 refer to as “The Seven Pillars of DevOps.” These pillars are all necessary to support effective DevOps delivery pipelines together with end-to-end orchestration of all pipeline stages and workflows. If any of the pillars falter, the DevOps pipeline will fail to produce high-performing benefits of the most successful enterprises.

So what are these essential seven DevOps pillars?

1. Collaborative Culture: End-to-end goal alignment and cooperative workflows are essential. No amount of technology will suffice if Dev, QA and Ops leaders and teams do not cooperate.
2. Design for DevOps: DevOps prefers products that are designed in modular fashion using microservices, 12-factor apps and containers—those are easily integrated into high-performance DevOps. That is not to say legacy products cannot benefit from DevOps, but modular, immutable architectures are most readily suited to take full advantage of DevOps.
3. Continuous Integration (CI): Merging forward quickly with competent integration practices that minimize rollbacks, interruptions and costly delays in the pipeline.
4. Continuous Testing (CT): Relevant quality testing at speed requires multiple strategies that ensure efficient coverage throughout the pipeline with minimal failures delivered to production, yet quick enough to not bottleneck the pipeline.
5. Continuous Monitoring (CM): Real-time lifecycle intelligent active monitoring and analytics are essential to accelerate real-time decisions at each stage of the pipeline and avoid bottlenecks.
6. Elastic Infrastructure: Infrastructures that are resilient and elastic perform much better. DevOps applies to most types of infrastructures including private data centers, special purpose bare-metal systems, virtualized functions, containerized packaged applications, private and public clouds and hybrid cloud environments.
7. Continuous Delivery (CD): Modular delivery packaging preparation and deployment solutions with orchestration of virtualized and containerized applications are preferred over monolithic mutable applications.

While DevOps implemented with all seven pillars provides a strong foundation for long-term enterprise business improvements, it is important to understand also that DevOps is not an island. Enterprises implementing DevOps should be aware that DevOps interoperates with other IT systems and practices. Enterprises are well-advised to choose tool-agnostic IT partners that can provide solutions that best suit the needs of each unique enterprise and can integrate and evolve DevOps together with all enterprise IT systems.

We believe DevOps is an essential part of enterprise success. Keep a look out for future blogs describing best practices for each of the seven pillars of DevOps in coming months.