Puppet Delivers 2018 State of DevOps Report with Five Stage Plan for DevOps Success

Source- bdaily.co.uk

DevOps in 2018 is a big deal. Most, if not all, enterprises have some sort of DevOps initiatives, and many have become non-stop software and data factories, operating 24×7. However, succeeding with DevOps has proved challenging and results vary wildly between companies.

In an effort to solve this problem, Puppet has released its State of DevOps Report this week. According to Puppet, one of the main goals of this report was to understand the DevOps journey and how organisations evolve their practices over time. It used analysis of the responses to create an overarching methodology that could help businesses succeed with DevOps:

Stage 0: Build the foundation

When development and operations teams are just starting to grasp the importance of collaboration and sharing, they rapidly implement technologies and processes to facilitate sharing of ideas, metrics, knowledge, processes, and technologies. This foundational stage is critical to the DevOps evolution, and the health of a successful DevOps organisation rests on the base that gets built during this initial stage.

Stage 1: Normalise the technology stack

At this stage, you may see the dev teams making a coordinated move to more agile development methods or a few teams organically adopting new methods for specific products or workflows. Development teams have adopted version control, which is the first step on the path to continuous integration and continuous delivery. They’re also beginning to normalise their tech stacks by eliminating redundant systems, perhaps refactoring applications to work on a smaller set of operating systems.

Stage 2: Standardise and reduce variability

This stage is where both dev and ops teams concentrate on reducing variance, continuing to standardise the tech stack by further reducing the number of operating systems to a single OS or OS family, and building on a standard set of technologies: databases, key value stores, message queues, identity stores and more. This standardisation phase reduces the overall complexity of the system, enabling teams to scale their expertise. For a business, the benefits are great: You can deploy new applications and services faster, and reduce errors that arise from inconsistency. Best of all, as the shared patterns evolve and improve, the quality of all services improve.

Stage 3: Expand DevOps practices

Now that the important foundational elements are in place, and the system is well understood, organisations can begin to address other pain points. Successful teams at this stage now reuse deployment patterns for building applications and services, and infrastructure changes are tested before deploying to production. Both these practices provide predictability and reliability, building trust in the new methods and practices. With this new level of trust in the system, important cultural shifts can take place in the organisation.

Stage 4: Automate infrastructure delivery

This stage in the DevOps journey is defined by the automation of systems configuration and provisioning, which many people consider to be a high-priority outcome of a DevOps initiative. Self-service for multiple departments ultimately leads to greater efficiency and satisfaction throughout the organisation.

Stage 5: Provide self-service capabilities

By the time an organisation gets to Stage 5, you can see the cumulative effects of achieving high levels of automation and trust. At this stage, resources are available via self-service, and incident response is automated. IT teams don’t automate just for the sake of automating; they do it to make the entire organisation run with greater efficiency and precision.

Nigel Kersten, VP of Ecosystem Engineering at Puppet commented: “While DevOps practices have become far more well known across our industry, organisations continue to struggle to scale pockets of DevOps success more broadly across multiple teams and departments.

“This year’s report explores the foundational practices that need to be in place in order to scale DevOps success, and proves that success can only scale when teams are enabled to work across functional boundaries.”