The DevOps concept largely originated in 2009, as software and IT organizations were beginning to adopt Agile methodologies. It came on the heels of a movement to integrate lean manufacturing concepts and infrastructure as a service into IT organizations. Rapid development was the goal, but application and infrastructure teams were still working independently, creating barriers to progress. Flickr employees John Allspaw and Paul Hammond delivered a presentation at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference that outlined ideas for streamlining deployment through better collaboration between development and operations. They hoped to temper conflicts between team members and minimize waste. DevOps took off soon after, when Patrick Debois founded the DevOpsDays conference in Belgium.
When DevOps is a mature practice in IT and software organizations, there are some powerful benefits:
- Every change to the application stack triggers a new deployment.
- Deployments become easy and not a fire drill.
- Fixing errors in production become a simple redeployment without the need to perform a huge root cause analysis up front.
The Long Road to DevOps
While many organizations are adopting DevOps practices and tools today, we’re still a long way from reaching DevOps maturity. Our company recently conducted a survey on DevOps adoption, and the findings indicate that there are still too many manual processes and silos standing in the way. I will break them down here:
Manual Infrastructure Management is Still Common
Nearly 40 percent of IT professionals surveyed say that they manage infrastructure manually. Yet nearly 60 percent report the use of infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, configuration management and Kubernetes. This speaks to a disconnect between having the technology available to operate in an automated way and being able to execute change with those tools. Heavy manual processes lead to higher costs, since so much effort goes toward tinkering with configurations and fixing problems. Manual work also detracts from the ability to members to focus on the application and business needs.
Managing Environments in Silos
Another tenet of DevOps infrastructure management is environmental parity. This means that through infrastructure-as-a-code tools and processes, IT manages all development environments similarly through a common code base. According to the survey, only 25 percent of companies are managing development, test and production environments identically. This results in application stability issues. Without environmental parity, every change will eventually lead to an outage.
Managing Teams in Silos
From the start, DevOps has emphasized breaking down the walls between development, QA and IT operations. The goal is to enable continuous feedback, fewer errors and faster development cycles. Of survey respondents, 78 percent report that separate teams are still managing infrastructure/operations and application development. As well, just because you create a DevOps team consisting of various job roles doesn’t mean that people are working together and are committed to the team’s success.
There must be incentives to encourage a developer to understand testing needs and for infrastructure engineers to get clear on a project’s requirements and objectives. There should be minimal tolerance for functional experts isolating themselves without making an effort to understand the bigger picture.
When organizations are able to minimize manual processes and break down these technology and silos, they benefit from a totally different, more productive way of working:
- Adoption of continuous integration/continuous deployment, whereby every code check-in triggers a testing cycle and a build.
- Transparency between infrastructure people and developers, avoiding surprises resulting in issues or rework later.
- Incorporation of success metrics, such as deployment frequency, mean time to detection (MTTD), mean time to recovery (MTTR) and change lead time.
- Cost reduction, from fewer errors and labor-intensive manual processes.
- Increased productivity, as developers get the infrastructure they need quickly to run new projects and QA and IT Ops people can focus on high quality, stability and user experience rather than repetitive tasks and troubleshooting.
So, What’s Going On?
Despite the many benefits of DevOps, there seems to be a lack of urgency in some organizations to take the necessary steps for change. Progressive IT departments that applaud agility and business value should be ahead of the curve, but that’s not always the case.
DevOps maturity comes down to setting the right culture for change, which must emanate from the top. The shift to DevOps takes time and investment, no doubt. There’s also need for patience. The transition temporarily slows down production as people adjust to new workflows and learn new skills. Replacing toolsets is just part of the strategy. Organizations must make a conscious effort to embrace DevOps with a well-thought out plan.
