The benefits of DevOps have been known for some time, but this year’s “Accelerate: State of DevOps” report shows that successful companies are extending the advantages they get from adopting it. The longest-running research of its kind, the report from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) represents five years of work surveying more than 30,000 technical professionals worldwide.
Based on their input, the report previously split organizations into low, medium and high performers. This year it added a new category—elite performers—who are embracing DevOps to raise the bar when it comes to the benefits they gain. Elite organizations are able to deploy code 46 times more frequently than low performers, lower lead times from committing to deploying changes to less than one hour (compared to one to six months in low performers), and recover from incidents 2,604 times faster.
The Importance of the Database
For the first time the report also focuses on the vital importance of the database to successful DevOps, echoing research from Redgate. As it points out, deploying changes to the database is often a bottleneck, slowing down DevOps. To overcome this, the Accelerate report recommends integrating database work into the software delivery process, based around four good practices:
Strong Communication and Cross-Team Collaboration
Traditionally, the teams involved in application and database development have had different priorities and responsibilities. The biggest concern with the database was to limit change to keep data safe, while application development was all about creating features, often without regard to what impact they would have on the database.
With DevOps, this has changed. The faster releases of smaller changes it encourages means the database cannot be a logjam at the end of the development pipeline. Instead, it needs to be part of the same workflow, so good, ongoing communication is vital.
In many organizations this is already happening: Fifty-eight percent of respondents in Redgate’s 2018 “State of Database DevOps” survey said that collaboration between developers and database administrators (DBAs) was either good or great, showing that the processes and teamwork are in place to break down any walls between departments.
Comprehensive Configuration Management
Using configuration management tools for software development is a central part of achieving successful DevOps results. To avoid issues, these same practices and tools need to be extended to cover the database as well. Handling changes systematically creates a seamless flow that enables faster releases and dramatically reduces issues—vital when more than a third of respondents to Redgate said they deployed database changes either daily or more than once a week.
Extending Version Control to the Database
As part of taking a holistic view, the Accelerate report found that extending version control from application code to database code delivered major benefits. Elite and high performers store database changes as scripts in version control and manage these changes in the same way as application changes. This is a task that is shared between DBAs and developers—75 percent of respondents to the Redgate survey said that application developers now build database deployment scripts, and were responsible for deploying these database changes to production in nearly half (47 percent) of organizations.
Building a Strong Culture
Culture is a strong factor in whether DevOps succeeds or fails in an organization. This is unsurprising given that DevOps is a very different process to those it replaces, focusing on speed, collaboration between teams and a willingness to be open and continually learn and improve.
Most people are now familiar with the work of sociologist Ron Westrum, who characterized the culture within organizations as one of three types:
- Pathological (power-oriented) companies work in silos, don’t cooperate and are quick to apportion blame if something goes wrong.
- Bureaucratic (rule-oriented) companies are more open, but are still suspicious of novelty and tolerate limited co-operation between teams.
- Generative organizations are most suited to successful DevOps, with a focus on co-operation, surfacing problems, breaking down silos, holding postmortems to understand why things have not gone well and continually experimenting to drive improvement.
To create the right culture for DevOps, leaders need to build trust with their teams, empower them with autonomy and rely on strong communication to ensure that everyone understands their role and overall objectives.
Summary
The latest “Accelerate: State of DevOps” report has a simple, top-line message: Higher software delivery performance enables better business outcomes. Achieving this requires taking a development-wide approach to DevOps, incorporating the database seamlessly into DevOps flows, communicating and collaborating between teams, sharing technical practices, and building a strong, open culture across organizations. Only then can businesses become high or elite performers, with an agile infrastructure that underpins their success.