DevOps, as we all know, is still a difficult word to the tech audience, and there are hundreds of companies with various definitions of their own. While everybody wants to practice DevOps, not many know the real importance and the need for doing DevOps. Misunderstanding DevOps causes too many problems, and it impacts the business severely.
The Reasons Behind Most Failed DevOps Implementations
No Clear Definition of Success
Most organizations do not know where they are or where they need to be regarding DevOps maturity. How do you know you’re ‘Done’? Is it when you ship daily? Weekly?
Fragmented DevOps Tools
The DevOps tools available today are fragmented point solutions that only help you automate specific tasks in particular stages of the DevOps workflow.
Non-Scalable Approach
DevOps efforts are usually ad-hoc and are not handled holistically across the entire organization.
When you are new to DevOps, it's hard to start; you will have so many questions in your mind about doing DevOps: how to start, where to end, and how to know you are done. You may also end up doing it the wrong way and impacting your business processes. Hence, all you need is a handy playbook that can describe an end to end DevOps implementation process. Shippable has recently introduced something like this as a 'DevOps Playbook.' This DevOps Playbook has:
- A quantitative approach to answering the questions: Have I achieved all I can with DevOps? Am I ‘Done’? We call this the DevOps Reality Score.
- A standard approach to implemented DevOps Automation, i.e. a platform that can connect the various tools available to give you end to end pipelines that preserve fidelity and visibility in a standard fashion.
DevOps Reality Score
Achieving Zero Touch Automation across all applications across your organization will get you to Full DevOps maturity. You can easily gauge where you currently are by creating the DevOps Reality Score matrix for each of your applications.
The matrix measures your level of DevOps maturity by estimating what portion of your software delivery workflow is automated, i.e. how far you are from achieving Zero Touch Automation for the application. In the example matrix above, the DevOps maturity is 6/16, i.e. 37.5%.
Complete this exercise for all applications in your organization and average the results. This gives you a DevOps Reality Score, which tells you where you are with your DevOps efforts across the organization.
You can achieve DevOps success by approaching it in a systematic fashion with a standard playbook and a powerful Automation platform with Shippable.