DevOps: Why getting the culture right is the key to success

Source – zdnet.com

One company that aims to take advantage of that trend towards DevOps is custom software development company Ness Digital Engineering.

It recently announced that it is taking on another 800 staff who would mostly specialise in DevOps and related technologies.

ZDNet spoke to its CTO, Moshe Kranc, a man who started in software development working on Arpanet back in the 1970s.

What’s your take on the current state of DevOps?

I meet with a lot of customers and I hear from them a lot about DevOps, it’s not something I need to sell them.

They have read about it, there are all kinds of statistics out there on the web about how it reduces deployment time from seven days to a half a day, reduces incident volume by a factor of twenty and other amazing improvements that any company would want.

I am typically talking to the business and the technical side of companies and it is usually the business side that is pushing it.But I can’t recommend a DevOps approach to every customer because it requires that you have done a decent amount of homework beforehand. You have to do a lot of groundwork in your organisation to implement DevOps. It’s a process that involves cultural and organisation change and we can help people through that.

I would think that customers would have a basic grasp of DevOps by now, or do you think there are still some issues there?

I don’t think the business side understand it that well. They understand, often from the competition, about the tremendous business benefits in things like the speed of deployment and so on, but I don’t think that they fully understand what it is and what’s involved.

They usually do understand that it is a process. That process starts with the culture – breaking down silos, changing attitudes, and so on. Helping Dev and Ops to work together.

Breaking down those walls between engineers is a process that takes time. That’s the hard part.