How to Scale DevOps to the Enterprise Level

Intense competition has driven enterprises across sectors to invest in DevOps and manage their digital systems. It helps to enhance developer velocity and enable digital transformation on a wider scale. At the same time, IT departments are embracing DevOps transformation to meet the evolving requirements of the organization and its customers in a rapidly changing digital economy. With the DevOps approach, large enterprises are able to develop software applications more rapidly than previously thought possible and keep upgrading such software applications on a continuous basis. The impact of the DevOps methodology is so apparent that enterprises having tightly coupled architectures have realized they have to either embrace it fully or be left behind. Thus, after realizing the benefits of adopting the DevOps approach, enterprises want to scale its adoption by cutting across the barriers of teams, applications, toolsets, workflows, processes, pipelines, and release cycles – both on cloud and legacy systems.

However, herein lies the catch: processes and tools that work flawlessly for use cases on a smaller scale may experience a hiccup when expanded to cover large teams and processes. This is due to the fact that the legacy architectures in such enterprises do not always allow seamless coordination among teams comprising hundreds of people and processes. What they need is an enterprise DevOps approach that addresses the unique challenges and lets them reach an agreement on the way to scale up DevOps. The DevOps methodology helps in increasing the impact and value of the digital infrastructure by combining legacy and new technologies. It allows enterprises to navigate change, derive time-to-value benefits, and lower risks. Thus, DevOps implementation should be about scaling DevOps principles and practices with quality, security, and velocity being embedded at every step of the way.

How to scale DevOps to the enterprise level

The positives of DevOps in terms of establishing a continuous testing framework, integrations, and delivery, need to be scaled across organizations to achieve a host of objectives. It ought to be done in the following ways:

Go for small wins and build on them: DevOps can fundamentally change the operational dynamics of an organization by breaking silos and driving everyone to work towards a common goal. This requires every stakeholder in the organization to buy into the approach or risk getting different results. The best DevOps approach would be to break down large complex projects into small, manageable entities and work. It will help the teams to learn quickly and act decisively. Teams working incrementally for smaller batches of work can identify and fix bottlenecks and achieve their objectives. Such small wins can help the team to build confidence in its ability to follow the DevOps methodology. The wins can give a boost to the project and enable the organization to apply DevOps across processes.

Management of end-to-end DevOps processes: To derive the optimum output through DevOps implementation, the platform should be manageable from a central location. To scale, there should be a single solution allowing the management of end-to-end workflow automation. With such centralized management, the organization can get clear visibility into the SDLC and other software assets. The job includes managing binaries, CI/CD pipelines, container images, risk and compliance, and last-mile deployments. Presently, several CI/CD tools allow the management of either workflows or outcomes, and not necessarily both. The DevOps platform should be able to automate and administer all processes, point tools, environments, and package types, and provide support for all technology artefacts and stacks. This allows the organization to plug into the toolset and/or legacy scripts and manage them from a single DevOps platform to achieve the following outcomes:

• Consistency and traceability of the entire range of artefacts throughout the SDLC as they pass through the "development to production" pipeline. This gives a single source of validation for the entire DevOps processes and continuous testing framework, improves code quality, governance, and security, and speeds up software delivery.
• Create a central repository for all binaries, DevOps testing, environments, container images, point tools, and others.
• Manage risk and compliance across tools, processes, and repositories, including the ones from third parties, from code to production.
• Get full visibility across the SDLC and the organization by breaking down silos or snowflake configurations. With the unified experience of working through a single platform, the organization can manage dependency downloads, deployments, pipelines, repositories, builds, and releases.

Bring every stakeholder on the same page: Most organizations have well-entrenched silos that can derail any initiative or innovation. So, even if the enterprise DevOps approach is successful in removing the silos or barriers, there is a risk of their re-emergence. This calls for motivating every stakeholder to buy into the silo-less DevOps-based ecosystem. And to do so would entail defining the desired behaviours and actions that every stakeholder is expected to perform and designing processes to reinforce the same. For instance, there may be a chance of conflicts arising if the ops team is measured only in terms of its ability to mitigate risks while the development team is measured in terms of its ability to deliver change. So, by applying inter or intra team collaboration metrics into the team and individual performance reviews, the organization can establish a common goal for everyone to work for.

Take the end-user into consideration: The ultimate objective of DevOps implementation is to deliver the best experience to the end-user. And, in the process of doing so, processes, systems, and work culture are changed and transformed. It is possible that in creating and enabling DevOps continuous integration, the sight of the end-user is lost. This should be actively guarded against by involving users in every step. Teams should take time to assess and understand the challenges, issues, constraints, and priorities of users. The knowledge so gained can be leveraged to define the KPIs or performance metrics and develop a continuous feedback mechanism.

Conclusion

Taking a DevOps approach across the organization is a long-term strategy and its success depends on the participation of every stakeholder. It is an evolving process or model that needs to be persisted with by experimenting with new ideas, capabilities, processes, and tools. Further, it is only when DevOps continuous integration is fully achieved across the organizational pipeline that enterprises can derive the best value.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.