By: Karl Rubin, COO
Every strong building is mapped out first on a blueprint before meeting concrete and cement. Similarly in DevOps, the foundation needs to be strong and resilient, as agility and rapid delivery are the essential elements of the DevOps paradigm. The blueprint that can help, then, is a maturity model.
A DevOps maturity model would be what enterprises can use to design, chart, and measure their DevOps journeys. However, the goalposts of collaboration, automation, and an agile pipeline are not fixed but rather dynamic and continuous. Hence, this blueprint assumes a different approach too. With a well-charted DevOps maturity model, organizations can know where they are moving and why. They can also keep track of their progress while correcting their course if any digressions or interruptions occur.
The Skyscraper: Step-by-Step
Here’s what one should consider when creating a DevOps maturity model:
1. Inject automation and continuous frameworks with an agile project approach.
2. Start reorganizing your teams, processes, and functions in a new way that is oriented towards the basic premise of DevOps – bringing Dev and Ops closer than ever before.
3. Inject agile practices, integrated workflows, automated processes in the life cycle.
4. Weave security, monitoring, and deployment on the fresh layer of automation and continuous models.
5. Find out what is working and what is impeding the DevOps journey.
6. Start with automated provisioning and frequent deployments.
7. Begin to use DevSecOps, Scrum models, lean practices, self-service environments, and continuous integration pipelines.
8. Make sure all teams start working with product-oriented and user-centric thinking for application development.
9. Add production-scale readiness for load testing, deployment, performance assessment, etc.
10. Anything which enhances deployment rate eliminates waste, advances production cycle efficiency, improves incident response time, elevates collaboration, and fuels time-to-market metrics should be kept. All barriers and distractions should be removed.
11. Effective dilution of islands between the Dev and Ops teams to ensure true collaboration and production-ready agility are unlocked in software development functions.
12. Know where you are. This is where you would recognize how much you need to achieve in removing delays, siloes, and rigidity in the application life cycle. Be aware of your limitations and challenges.
13. Identify inefficiency spots and cost-burdens in infrastructure, testing, and deployment areas.
Footnotes As You Proceed
To sum it up, a robust DevOps maturity model would comprise of these essential building blocks in various combinations and shades:
- Culture
- Strategy
- Process
- People
- Structure
- Agility
- Automation
- Adaptability, scalability, operational efficiency
- Customer-centricity
DevOps is a new universe and is fast changing into a reality rather than an ideal. The Global DevOps Market stood at $6 B in the year 2020, and as per a study by Global Industry Analysts, it is expected to reach $17.8 B by 2026.
Embrace this reality as soon as you can. The day when things like impressive deployment frequency, fast release cycles, and built-in quality start becoming like second nature for your application teams, you can pat yourself for arriving at the final stages of this journey.
