Since I published my blog explaining the topic of ‘Big DevOps’ late last year, the concept of Enterprise DevOps has exploded, with commentary, experience, and advice (some good, some awful) popping up from many different quarters. Fortunately, many pundits have now come to agree that application delivery in a traditional enterprise is very different from in a typical web-scale/startup environment.
As a result, a growing body of work is filling a significant and important gap with unique insight into Enterprise DevOps, from many excellent commentators and practitioners who understand how large enterprises are different, and how to address those different challenges.
As Enterprise DevOps takes off, I seem to field questions about it on an almost daily basis, so I decided to contribute to the body of work with a webinar explaining my answers to five of the most frequent challenges I hear about DevOps at scale. It was titled ‘Big DevOps: Five Top Tips When Implementing at Scale’ and you can catch the full replay on YouTube.
The top five issues I chose to address are below:
My five ‘Big DevOps’ tips for overcoming these issues center mainly on cultural change, because DevOps is primarily a cultural and attitudinal shift. However, it is also undoubtedly true that certain technologies can play a large part in enabling that change, especially in the more complex world of larger enterprises.
With that in mind, my top five tips to address these challenges are as follows:
- Facilitate a culture of teaming and collaboration – this is at the core of devops in any environment, large or small, but especially for large organizations with bright lines between teams, this is essential to overcoming the tyranny of complex and dispersed silos
- Establish agile development as a shared discipline – agile development is brings code to market faster, but can result in just filling the clogged pipes of PMO, HR, training, security, and other departments faster. ‘Agile’ needs to be common throughout the SDLC – in dev, ops, and beyond
- Automate relentlessly to enable rapid devops response – automation allows faster execution throughout the system, enabling downstream processes to keep up with speed of DevOps. Automation also adds audit and governance, especially important to larger organizations
- Push smaller releases faster, measure and remediate impact – large organizations especially are can avoid big errors by avoiding big releases. Adopt faster, smaller cycles with closer scrutiny to achieve a DevOps approach while managing the risk of faster cycles and fewer controls
- Manage user identities to enable shared access – in smaller organizations it might be acceptable to give out root access like candy, but not for large enterprises. Identity and access management can enable a new DevOps approach that is safe, secure, auditable, and well-governed
While these tips may not be the perfect answer for every organization, I have seen how these approaches have made the journey to DevOps easier, safer, and more effective for big enterprises. I hope they help you on your journey.
If so, you will want to stay tuned to staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Since starting work on Enterprise DevOps concepts, I have collected many questions on how large organizations can best succeed in their DevOps transformation. I will be sharing these questions along with my answers here on staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud in a regular series, to give everyone the chance to understand how large enterprises can overcome the challenges of adopting DevOps at scale.
So keep your eyes out for my posts over the coming days, weeks, and months in the brand new occasional series, ‘Enterprise DevOps Q&A’. I hope you will keep reading, and maybe even help me out by discussing your experiences and ideas in the comments below.
Finally if you have any questions about Big DevOps, Enterprise DevOps, or anything to do with adopting a DevOps approach at scale, let me know in the comments below too. I would love to hear from you, and answer your questions if I can, or source guest opinions from the DevOps community.
Meanwhile, please stay tuned for more Enterprise DevOps Q&A. I am excited to continue the discussion on what it takes to transform application delivery at scale.
I shared these ideas (and more) at a workshop with a Fortune 50 customer a couple weeks ago, to great feedback. So I hope it helps others struggling with these issues.
Remember to let me know here in the comments any questions you have about DevOps. I will try to answer them here, or in a new post. And I don’t know it all, but if I can’t answer your question, I will find someone who can! 🙂
Thanks for reading,
Andi Mann
CA Technologies.
Great article.
However, the more I delve into the ideologies of DevOps the more I agree that DevOps is so much more than Dev and Ops. To be honest, I’m starting to think the term is starting to outgrow itself. My point is that as Development and Operations teams continue to increase efficiency by breaking down barriers and embracing continuous integrations and collaboration, but other departments are becoming the bottlenecks.
I’ve read a few articles about this, but it isn’t as prominent in these DevOps conversations. It would make sense that Enterprise DevOps would require the breaking down of silos across the whole organization. For example, sales and marketing is doing the same thing with marketing/sales automation and SaaS platforms, such as Salesforce, much like Development and Operations is doing it with APM tools. But you still have the gaps between technical and marketing/sales types.
Greg, thanks for the comments. Yes, I agree – I keep syaing DevOps does not start with Dev or end with Ops. Especially for enterprises, Business Analysts, Planning, PMO, Security, DBAs, Test/QA and more are all part of the end-to-end SDLC. So going fast in just the dev-to-ops section is just part of the story.
Then as you allude to, we must consider the impacts across the business of delivering new services faster – things like like staff training, recruiting, marketing campaigns, sales programs and more must be accommodated before the business service is really ‘delivered’. So you’re right, if we do not extend DevOps beyond just dev and ops, we just end up pumping more stuff into the same sized pipe.
Great point Greg, thanks for reading and adding your thoughts.
I really enjoyed the article. I’m glad to see the DevOps at scale issue addressed.
What tasks do you think should be automated that currently are not? How secure are automation practices? What are some tools you use to automate these tasks?
Conner, thanks for reading, for your comment and questions.
Opportunities for automation typically exist at the boundaries in the SDLC flow. For example, release automation for moving apps between dev, test, QA, prod, etc.; provisioning automation to allow devs to self-serve to ‘known good’ environments; configuration automation to make sure such environments are standardized; or test automation to ensure test consistency and repeatability.
It depends on the function or tool, but mostly automation is not just secure, but often improves security, by replacing poorly written, managed, and/or secured scripts; allowing tighter restrictions on manual work; and adding audit and control to dev & ops processes.
I hate to name specific tools because I have a conflict of interest working for a vendor (CA Technologies). Obviously I recommend our solutions (like CA Release Automation, CA Service Virtualization, and CA Cloud Manager); but there are many good tools from vendors large and small, as well as open source startups.
I hope this helps. If you (or anyone) wants more details or examples, I’d be happy to make this a topic for a full post in future.
Andi.