By all outward appearances DevOps is gaining real velocity within IT shops worldwide, Duh tell you something you don’t know. I have read much on this topic as I am sure you have, but I never seem to read much with hard data results, other than we are doing great with some very broad metrics. What are the hard numbers as compared to the legacy IT shop? So my search begins; where in the world are devops metrics in Fortune 500/Enterprise organizations?
What got me thinking about this were a couple of recent AppDynamics blogs “Measuring your devops success” and “Quantifying the value of devops”. Both blogs do an excellent job at breaking down DevOps to the implementation level. Hard data creates metrics that set a baseline with the legacy system that is the critical measurement component, without a baseline there is nothing to compare or measure against. This approach creates a meaningful way to measure the success of executing a DevOps strategy within an IT shop. The blogs also point other factors not quite as easy to measure, particularly human elements. Many others have written on measuring DevOps, you need to adopt the approach that makes sense for you and your organization.
At that point I figured it was time to visit Puppet Labs, when you think DevOps Puppet Labs and their survey’s comes to mind. I utilized the 2013 State of DevOps Report; the 2014 report is not available yet. I believe that in order for any new philosophy to be adopted as a true standardized practice, the C-level in Fortune 500 organizations need to embrace it. In my long experience, typically the first sign of acceptance in traditional Fortune 500 organizations is when the financial vertical embraces it. As an example, Wall Street traders will pay good money to save two milliseconds on a trade.
The Puppet Labs report numbers demonstrate real velocity in the adoption of DevOps as an accepted business practice. The first takeaways I had from the report were that organizations ship code 30x times faster with 50% fewer failures. The numbers paint a glowing picture for DevOps. But looking beyond the glowing numbers, I see something else. DevOps is at a critical fork in the road and needs to cross the chasm before it loses its luster and becomes just another application development tool, as opposed to a practice.
Only 17% of the respondents were Managers or C-level, with only 22% of respondent companies having 10,000 employees or more. It is essential to look at individual Fortune 500 companies IT shops and measure them with hard data before and after the implementation of DevOps. I would love to read some in depth case studies of the Fortune 500 with hard numbers and metrics; I did not find anything with the legacy baseline data. A huge benefit of DevOps to the Fortune 500 is it will enable them to fail fast as opposed to continuing an implementation that will inevitably fail anyway and consume a huge amount resource in the process. Anyone who has worked for a Fortune company I am sure has witnessed this.
In truly understanding what DevOps is and is not, certain questions need real answers; Are Enterprise/Fortune 500 companies really doing the same old thing and just need to write better code utilizing some new application development tools, does that make it DevOps or just continuous improvement? Will some IT execs change the organizations title from sysadmin to Devops Admin to protect their silo and make them seem kinder gentler Ops? Are the DevOps tools available today ready for prime time in the Fortune 500 IT environment? Is Devops about technology and metrics or really about culture? We can speculate, but time will tell us the real answers. I am looking for good metrics on what does DevOps do to a Fortune 500 company Not some so called Unicorn that was born with a DevOps spoon in its mouth, but a good old fashioned Wall Street firm who adopts DevOps. Until then call me the DevOps skeptic.
If you would like say something; email parker@devops.com and don’t forget to comment here.
