Democratizing devops: extending velocity and visibility to the entire enterprise

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. The challenging dynamics in software delivery
  3. The move toward devops
  4. Governance and the CIO
  5. Key takeaways
  6. About Robert Benefield

1. Summary

The CIO has two conflicting priorities: accelerating the pace of IT delivery and maintaining security and governance. This ongoing struggle is complicated by localized pockets of development, each with a unique blend of tools, procedures, and reporting, creating inconsistency and a lack of communication. To move toward the goal of productivity and security, businesses must discard organizational silos and practices and embrace a more collaborative, transparent working environment.

Two recent movements have helped businesses make significant advances toward organizational consistency. Devops emphasizes collaboration and integration between development and IT operations, while infrastructure as code brings structured software development practices to the infrastructure management space. To date, however, most of the work on devops has been focused only toward improving operational speed, and very little effort has been spent on the visibility needed for proper governance. To address these shortcomings, businesses must extend operational tools throughout the entire testing and development organization, align dev, test, and ops around a single pipeline with shared success metrics, and provide unified dashboards and reporting to ease the administrative burden.

Key findings include:

  • Advances in iterative development, cloud technologies, and automated deployment practices are breaking traditional workflows and governance.
  • Devops opens a door to the tools and communication organizations need to overcome these challenges.
  • Unifying and extending automated deployment tools across the development, test, and operations divisions can greatly improve speed, accuracy, and reliability.
  • Combining deployment and configuration management tools with other toolchains across a continuous delivery pipeline can further improve flow while enhancing lifecycle insights that can uncover potential risks and bottlenecks. The integration of dashboards and application lifecycle management (ALM) tools can further improve availability and correlation of this information.
  • While agile practices render documentation-heavy governance practices impractical, businesses can use event capture, artifact correlation practices, and access management to maintain agility without sacrificing control and visibility.

Thumbnail image courtesy of karammiri.

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