When adopting DevOps, the initial steps that you take as an organization doesn’t involve much struggle. There are DevOps consulting companies to help ease the process. This phase is all about passionate teams, new processes, and efficiency. But what lacks in such a stage is DevOps at scale, the ultimate goal of your organization.
Organizations run trailblazer projects and ignore the fact that these trailblazer projects should leave a trail for others to follow if they want to scale DevOps. This challenge is one reason why organizations find it hard to scale DevOps.
By now, you might have got the idea about the complexity of scaling DevOps. However, there are large organizations taking up such challenges and paving the way for companies that are struggling with scaling DevOps.
Expert tips on how to scale DevOps
Let’s discuss what these experts have to advise organizations stuck on their DevOps journey.
1. Don’t rush into selecting frameworks:
According to Eran Kinsbruner, lead technical evangelist at Perfecto, DevOps teams are required to match skills, traditional processes, and tools to scale DevOps, and then slowly accelerate each and every DevOps phase and make them stable. For starters, the user stories and value streams should be planned properly. Then, it is suggested to go through version control and software building with the help of practices like trunk-based development in order to control several code branches and merges.
Later, when you enter into the integration and testing phase, you need a platform for automation which ought to be scalable. For this, proper frameworks are what the teams require to match their skills and objectives. Also, the deployment to production phase should be automated entirely with the help of containers and orchestration tools. It is imperative to virtualize phased environments, be it staging, quality assurance, or production. Don’t forget to ensure that the latest test data is put to use to gain relevant insights.
2. Build a clear and straightforward path:
Ben Grinnell, Managing Director and Global Head of Technology & Digital, North Highland, recommends that companies should try investing in a ‘clear the trail’ program along with trailblazing DevOps efforts if they want to scale. This program helps you sought out the mess and ensures a clear path forward.
He suggests that it is imperative to create momentum and organizational support through communications by acknowledging the new, yet, successful ways of working. Guiding the team in the next wave of projects who are trying their hands on DevOps for the first time and acknowledging them is different from the trailblazing.
3. Change the essence of accountability:
As per Gordon Haff, Technology Evangelist at Red Hat, “Setting up a system and environment that allows and encourages experiments enables successful failure in agile software development. It doesn’t mean that no one is accountable for failures. In fact, it makes accountability easier because ‘being accountable’ needn’t equate to ‘having caused some disaster.’ In this respect, it changes the nature of accountability. Four factors will prove crucial.”
4. Identify organizational scar tissue:
Manuel Pais, DevOps consultant and co-author of “Team Topologies” says that a substandard outlook would be to try to implement the practices to other functions directly when trying to amplify DevOps practices beyond development and operations. Organizational scar tissues are the controls and procedures that have been applied as a reaction to previous incidents but do not make sense any longer. Identifying such processes should be removed instead of automating an inefficient process.
5. Give time to the culture shift:
According to Jayne Groll, CEO at DevOps Institute states that scaling DevOps should be as cultural and incremental as agile software development itself. Small teams joining hands with other small teams results in more and more people employing a fresh way of working and cultural transformation beginning to emerge at scale.
Source: CIO, The Enterprisers Project
Ajeet Singh
