Next steps to DevOps: a game plan for adoption and implementation

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Defining DevOps
  3. Barriers to adoption
  4. Adopting the DevOps mindset and its practices
  5. Encouraging and improving DevOps skills
  6. DevOps case studies
  7. Key takeaways
  8. About Paul Duvall
  9. About Kris Buytaert

1. Summary

As is now well known, DevOps seeks to align business goals with the goals of development and operations teams. Associated with it are other practices such as continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI).

Organizations wanting to embrace DevOps often limit their success by falling victim to common barriers to adoption: inconsistent business goals, focusing solely on certain organizational silos, and failing to address organizational structure changes and misaligned software systems.

Before DevOps, many organizations found that delivering software was a long, error-prone, and burdensome process. Eventually, using tenets from existing methodologies and practices such as agile, ITIL, lean, and continuous delivery/integration, those organizations solved the problem by bringing teams together that were traditionally siloed. The DevOps approach required these teams to approach the software lifecycle more systematically so that they could release software to users more quickly with greater frequency.

Key findings in this report include:

  • High-performing organizations deploy more frequently, reduce lead times, reduce the number of failures, and reduce the mean time to recover.
  • Following the lead of early DevOps adopters — mostly online companies — an ever-rising number of traditional enterprises is becoming more IT-centered and must begin adopting the same practices as those early adopters if they are to compete and survive.
  • High-performing Devops organizations create small, cross-functional teams, treat software as a whole system, version all assets, deploy in small batches, and create fast feedback loops.
  • Businesses must avoid the common traps of DevOps adoption, such as focusing too much on certain teams and inadvertently creating new organizational silos.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of Gigaom.

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