Battling DevOps Bottlenecks
While alignment of people, processes and products enables DevOps, those elements also can create obstacles.
For DevOps, large-scale adoption across an organization is vitally important. Adoption of DevOps will not succeed if it doesn't occur at a broad scale. A one-off initiative will produce only modest success.
To succeed, organizations must align teams across common goals while sustaining best practices and establishing a maturity roadmap that makes sense. Everything must be tailored to the needs of the organization. If consensus is not obtained, the organization may end up abandoning the effort before it comes to fruition. If an organization only sees small-scale success, it will be difficult to sustain change across the entire enterprise.
People play a vital role in the success of DevOps. If everyone isn’t on board, adoption of DevOps will falter.
Organizations Must Institute Processes That Support Change
Often, top DevOps performers look first at where they can remove large-scale activities that take up a lot of time and resources. Those activities might include network provisioning, disc provisioning, changes to virtual machines and servers, and related tasks. By standardizing those processes and standardizing the way in which they change, organizations can reduce the risk of human error. They can then ensure changes are made in the way they must occur. Predictability is important to successful adoption of DevOps.
It’s important for an organization to support DevOps through the proper processes. Optimizing software development lifecycle processes and change management processes should be a top priority. To bring multiple resources together, an organization must adopt continuous integration and delivery. Ensuring all of these processes are running well will accelerate approval processes, clearing the way for widespread adoption of DevOps.
Products Should Facilitate, Not Hinder, DevOps
While the proper tools can help an organization adopt DevOps, a misguided focus on products can create obstacles. Organizations might focus too much on the brands or infrastructure involved. These details matter less with DevOps, which stresses best practices and automation to drive desired outcomes.
Organizations dependent on manual activities might also maintain inconsistent environments across the enterprise. It’s important to bring operations teams and development teams together to gain an understanding of organizational goals. Developers work within provisioned configured environments established by an operations team. Developers work on the software that operates on the top layer of those environments; operations teams run and update those environments. Instead of manually managing and configuring systems, developers and operators should provision and configure them using code to avoid bottlenecks to DevOps.
If this seems like a lot to manage effectively, that’s because it is. Partners can be extremely helpful, providing valuable perspective on what might work best for an organization. Outside experts can speak to what other organizations are doing and what cutting-edge tools are available. They can apply lessons learned and best practices after evaluating a client’s environment.
Story by Rachel Arey, a senior inside solution architect at CDW focused on DevOps. She has worked at CDW for more than four years. Prior to her current role, she was a business development specialist focused on Oracle. She is the host of the Simplifying DevOps podcast.
