DevOps – a software development and deployment process centered on faster releases, efficiency and readiness – has spread among enterprise IT organizations over the past decade.
According to recent 451 Alliance research, the key benefits of a DevOps approach include:
- Flexibility to quickly respond to changes
- More efficient use of personnel
- Faster software releases
Organizations not currently deploying DevOps are most likely to cite cost, technical complexity and governance/security/compliance as barriers to adoption.
In the 451 Alliance member webinar, What Does DevOps Maturity Look Like?, analyst Jay Lyman explored those barriers in more detail and provided some tips for overcoming them.
Get Buy-in from the Top
As DevOps has matured as a practice, we’re starting to see more DevOps practitioners who have ascended to leadership roles. These are your natural advocates for adoption.
Lyman emphasizes how important it is to get stakeholders in management on board with adopting DevOps. Having friends in high places does a lot to smooth over hurdles in implementation.
Bottlenecks to DevOps testing
In terms of DevOps and workflow, there are bottlenecks in the area of testing, according to Jay Lyman, Principal Analyst, Cloud Native and DevOps.
Lyman said that “we still hear about DevOps teams or developers waiting on the right test environment and infrastructure from their IT operations team.”
Using the DevOps ‘toolbox’
There is a wide array of tools for DevOps. Because of the variation of DevOps tools from one organization to another, there’s not really a definite tool chain. Instead, Lyman calls this the DevOps toolbox.
Like a rising trade professional accumulates tools over time, developers add to their toolbox as new needs arise or as new tools become available.
Lyman says that “by giving the developers and the DevOps team some freedom and flexibility on which tools to use, the organization can sanction the toolbox” and shift the focus to the process.
One way to address the testing bottleneck is to “ask the developers and the DevOps team what tooling you need to make this faster and what will help the IT operations team provide the environments and infrastructure for testing to the DevOps team more efficiently.”
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