A guide to understanding the big picture of DevOps
DevOps is no longer a competitive advantage. Today, DevOps adoption is so widespread that it has become an industry standard. The question is no longer: why should my company prioritize a DevOps transformation? Instead, it is: will we survive if we don’t?
Successful DevOps adoption eases the pressure off engineering departments and top management. Software projects reach the finishing line faster, simpler, and in the process every department benefits.
Understanding the big picture of DevOps makes choosing solutions and planning a way forward for your company easier. This guide will give you the understanding of an enterprise DevOps transformation that you need to scale across your organization and improve business outcomes.
The guide is organized into three parts:
- Cultural practices
- Technical practices
- Leading successful DevOps transformations
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DevOps calls into question the entire traditional development processes
There are many misunderstandings around DevOps and these hinder organizations from reaching their full potential.
One way to explain DevOps is that it started from the notion that Development and Operations were in functional silos with conflicting goals. This leads to the so-called chronic conflict between Dev and Ops which leads to bad business outcomes due to handovers, excessive bureaucracy, and lack of autonomy. DevOps calls into question the entire traditional development processes.
The DevOps movement has broken down those silos but is thirsty for more. It has moved beyond just covering Dev and Ops, and beyond a grassroots movement into the mainstream enterprise scene.
DevOps is now about product management, site reliability, technical excellence, and healthy company culture. The most important thing about DevOps is to connect feedback from end-users in production environments to development teams, such that they are able to react to market conditions and out-learn their competition. Read more
A little bit more about DevOps and why it drives performance
Conceptually, DevOps is often defined as CALMS: Culture, Automation, Lean, Measuring, and Sharing. You can watch this two-minute video on CALMS to learn more:
DevOps is the cornerstone of business agility. Why? Because DevOps practices drive software delivery performance and software delivery performance drives business outcomes. This is a fact proven by DORA, a DevOps Research and Assessment entity that has surveyed 31,000 software professionals over the past six years.
Culture practices
Cultural patterns tend to override strategic efforts, no matter how skillfully crafted the strategy. A healthy culture is one where there are transparency and clarity. Team members can bring their whole selves to work in a psychologically safe environment.
The guide answers questions like Are you really working the Agile way? What are the best approval processes? How to handle requirements with a platform team? How to encourage a data-driven company culture?
Technical practices
Continuous Delivery pipelines with version control are essential technical concepts. In this section, the guide covers actionable insights and quality assurance, as well as how to make the most of the cloud with DevOps and how DevOps strengthens security.
This guide focuses on the big picture. That's why the concrete benefits of using specific tools like containers, Kubernetes, Git, Atlassian, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and many others are outside the scope.
Leading successful DevOps transformations
The biggest challenges enterprises face when it comes to DevOps are organizational and cultural. Without active support from top management, there is a high risk of the organization slipping back into its old ways. That's why to scale DevOps across the organization, a real commitment from the whole organization is key.
In this section of the guide, you'll get advice on the communities of practice and community builders, DevOps roadmaps, and the use of design systems.
Check out the latest DevOps trends
The landscape of software development is undergoing a transformative shift evidenced by the surge of Generative AI tools being introduced in 2023. Prepare your organization for the benefits and challenges that AI will be bringing to the table.
As leading practitioners for more than 17 years, our team here at Eficode has seen trends come and go. Each year we present our views on the most important changes in software development.
In this guide, we’ll be exploring four key trends for 2024 that will define the intersection of AI and DevOps, including a look at:
- GenAI and the need for DevOps as a safety net
- Tooling consolidation for moving to big platforms
- Compliance and security
- Platform engineering becoming more centric
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