DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • DevOps Chats
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Communities
    • AWS Community Hub
    • CloudBees
    • IT as Code
    • Rocket on DevOps.com
    • Traceable on DevOps.com
    • Quali on DevOps.com
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Digital Anarchist
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Practices
  • ROELBOB
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps

Home » Blogs » Doin' DevOps » You Say You’re Doing DevOps, But What Does That Mean?

You Say You’re Doing DevOps, But What Does That Mean?

By: Michael Madden on January 27, 2016 3 Comments

From recent conversations I have been having, it is clear that DevOps is top of mind for many. Out of the 40 or so customers I have spoken with recently, the overwhelming majority brought up DevOps during our conversation. They believe they ought to do DevOps, but they wanted me to help them define it and point the best way to get started.

Related Posts
  • You Say You’re Doing DevOps, But What Does That Mean?
  • DevOps Unbound EP 21 Leading a DevOps Transformation – Lessons Learned – TechStrong TV
  • DevOps Unbound EP 19 – How AI and ML are being used in DevOps Today – TechStrong TV
    Related Categories
  • Blogs
  • Doin' DevOps
    Related Topics
  • agile
  • devops
  • devops implementation
  • IT operations
Show more
Show less

From my experience, many claim to be “doing DevOps,” but when you drill in, you’ll find wildly varying degrees of what this means. If a team is doing anything at all within the larger DevOps value chain, such as testing their software, they often believe they’re doing DevOps.

Our latest survey on the implementation of DevOps points out how easy it is for companies to say they’re doing DevOps but how difficult it is to do DevOps effectively. There’s widespread agreement among the respondents on all the different things that should get done, but very few people are making significant progress in most of them. If you ask about specific DevOps success factors, very few people are doing them.

Understanding, Then Doing DevOps

Why is DevOps so hard? In general:

  1. companies don’t know how to do it
  2. companies aren’t sure what it is
  3. it’s too hard given the existing organization and/or culture
  4. too many jobs and people identify with existing tools and technologies
  5. there may be regulatory issues
  6. there’s a lack of leadership on what needs to get accomplished and the direct impact on users/customers

The biggest issue usually is the organizational structure. People within IT are working in roles that have institutionalized the separation of dev and ops for 20 or 30 years, and suddenly this must change. Ops, in particular, has a process that is somewhat opaque, but now it has to be transparent, ops teams have to coordinate closely with the development teams, and they are being measured on totally different things. That’s a huge shift.

Going back to the results of the survey, if you told me 20 percent of companies are doing some element of DevOps exceptionally well, I would agree with that. If you tell me 20 percent of companies are doing DevOps end-to-end the way I think it ought to be done, I would say that number is probably closer to 5 percent.

The definition of DevOps makes all the difference. To me, DevOps focuses on the distance between the idea and the customer, whether that idea is a feature, an application or a business model. The purpose of DevOps is to optimize that distance.

I use the word “optimize” for a very particular reason, because there are several different dimensions beyond speed that we need to think about. We also need to optimize for reliability, or perhaps it is appropriate to think of that as quality. Efficiency is another dimension: How much does it cost to run that pipeline? Finally, agility: If I have to make a change based on the customer feedback or the market conditions, how rapidly can I change?

Based on your customers and what you’re trying to achieve in your business, you might optimize for those four dimensions differently than some other company. In some cases, a company might choose to emphasize speed, rolling out a new release every single day. In other cases, reliability, efficiency or agility might be given more weight.

The purpose of DevOps is to make speed, reliability, efficiency and agility a given so companies can focus on digital disruption and serving their customers better—we can see that in the survey results. If we also look at the 20 percent that are farthest along in implementing DevOps, we see their most important metrics are customer-facing metrics. In other words, it is clear that with the emergence of companies focused on business insight analytics, more organizations want to know if their application is meeting the needs of the customers as it was intended.

This is where the cultural and organizational challenges of DevOps come into play. If the ops team owns ops-related metrics, and the dev team owns dev-related metrics, then the organization is probably losing its focus on the customers. Those internal, traditional metrics are not going to get organizations to the Promised Land. You may have developed a bunch of code faster because you’re agile—and that’s great—but it’s only the first step. Instead, if we turn this around and say, “We expect this application to generate a million dollars of new revenue every four hours,” that’s a totally different mindset, and you have a much better chance of DevOps success. The app is either generating the revenue or not, and it’s the feedback you get based on the usage of the application that tells you what else you need to do.

ING is a great example of a company that has a group of people who are focused on metrics that track the distance between the idea and the customers, and they wake up every day with a focus on how to optimize that distance. The rest of the company is then organized and culturally aligned to deliver against that.

When you talk to most companies, you’ll find that there are elements of agile development, code pipelining or release automation that they do very well. These companies are taking a vertical or functional slice—such as test automation or release automation—and concentrating on optimizing there. That just gets us back to where we started our discussion, with everybody saying they are doing DevOps but no one doing it successfully. A better way would be to take an application and optimize all of the delivery metrics around that application. Take it all the way, end-to-end, and focus on solving a customer problem. Once that end-to-end distance is optimized, then you can apply what you’ve learned to other applications.

Filed Under: Blogs, Doin' DevOps Tagged With: agile, devops, devops implementation, IT operations

Sponsored Content
Featured eBook
The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

The State of Open Source Vulnerabilities 2020

Open source components have become an integral part of today’s software applications — it’s impossible to keep up with the hectic pace of release cycles without them. As open source usage continues to grow, so does the number of eyes focused on open source security research, resulting in a record-breaking ... Read More
« If It Acts Like a Duck
DevOps Chat: Rosalind Radcliffe and Bimodal IT »

TechStrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

Bring Your Mission-Critical Data to Your Cloud Apps and Analytics
Tuesday, August 16, 2022 - 11:00 am EDT
Mistakes You Are Probably Making in Kubernetes
Tuesday, August 16, 2022 - 1:00 pm EDT
Taking Your SRE Team to the Next Level
Tuesday, August 16, 2022 - 3:00 pm EDT

Latest from DevOps.com

Techstrong TV: Scratching the Surface of Testing Through AI
August 12, 2022 | Alan Shimel
Next-Level Tech: DevOps Meets CSOps
August 12, 2022 | Jonathan Rende
The Benefits of a Distributed Cloud
August 12, 2022 | Jonathan Seelig
Cycode Expands Scope of AppDev Security Platform
August 11, 2022 | Mike Vizard
Techstrong TV: The Use of AI in Low-Code
August 11, 2022 | Charlene O'Hanlon

Get The Top Stories of the Week

  • View DevOps.com Privacy Policy
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Download Free eBook

The State of the CI/CD/ARA Market: Convergence
https://library.devops.com/the-state-of-the-ci/cd/ara-market

Most Read on DevOps.com

Leverage Empirical Data to Avoid DevOps Burnout
August 8, 2022 | Bill Doerrfeld
CREST Defines Quality Verification Standard for AppSec Testi...
August 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard
MLOps Vs. DevOps: What’s the Difference?
August 10, 2022 | Gilad David Maayan
Cloud-Native: It’s One Thing
August 8, 2022 | Alan Shimel
We Must Kill ‘Dinosaur’ JavaScript | Microsoft Open Sources ...
August 11, 2022 | Richi Jennings

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2022 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.