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In the last two articles, we understood DevOps from the perspective of [employee] and [Leader], respectively.
- Understand DevOps from an employee’s perspective
- Understand DevOps from the Leader’s perspective
If you are a decision maker, how should you understand DevOps?
review
| role | understand |
|---|---|
| employees | Follow a process with a set of tools and a set of rules to get things done. Most employees don’t perceive or question processes or tools. |
| Leader | The person who makes the rules, the person who implements them, needs to specify, change, evaluate the rules according to the team. The Leader needs toCAMSAnd the actual situation of the team, building team culture, automation, evaluation system, sharing system. |
Agile, DevOps is just one way
Don’t make this mistake:
You can’t be competitive without DevOps, you can be competitive with DevOps.
For example, if you have a startup team of 3-5 people, DevOps is not going to help them directly and should focus more on developing the business and polishing the product.
In previous articles, we have discussed concepts such as Agile and DevOps, which are just ways to improve [enterprise competitiveness] from the perspective of decision makers.
Any enterprise can have a better way to improve [enterprise competitiveness] according to its own situation.
What can DevOps bring to the enterprise?
As a decision maker, you need to understand what DevOps does and does not do for your organization.
Puppet categorizes the benefits of DevOps into the following four categories, which we then relate to the core elements of the enterprise.
Therefore, DevOps itself does not [directly improve] the value of a business or a product. Instead, DevOps improves the productivity of an enterprise, thus enhancing its competitiveness.
DevOps is like Europe’s advanced youth system. It won’t get us to the World Cup, however, it is a necessary condition for us to become a football power.
If you want to introduce, how do you do it?
If DevOps is intended to improve [enterprise competitiveness], it is recommended that decision makers make decisions in the following order.
- Determine the timing
- Identify the problem points and choose the order of implementation
- Top-down promotion
- Provide resources and adjust the structure
- Evaluate the result and give affirmation
Judge the timing. – Is it time?
Whether DevOps should be introduced at this time can be judged from two aspects: external and internal.
The external environment
The DevOps ecosystem is the external environment, so let’s take a look at the external state of DevOps.
According to current research, the external environment for DevOps is quite ripe.
In general, demography, policy, maturity, etc. are all conducive to DevOps adoption. In our view, demography is the focus.
To put it bluntly, the competition for talent will become more intense.
1. Demographically driven — from demographic dividend to engineer red power
The population of the software industry continues to grow, while the domestic population gradually shows a declining trend, and the demographic dividend of the software industry gradually disappears.
By 2030, there are expected to be more than 45 million developers worldwide.
From: Software Developer Statistics 2021
The population of the domestic software industry is expected to exceed 9 million by 2025.
From: White paper on Talent in key Software areas
According to the national Census Bureau, China is now facing the trend of an aging population.
Source: China Population Report 2020
2. Industry Driven – The software industry continues to grow
The software industry will continue to grow, and DevOps will grow with it.
From: IResearch: DevOps Application Development in China in 2020 — Original Series report by IResearch (II)
3. Technology driven — cloud native, container technology promotion
As containers and clouds became ubiquitous, DevOps grew.
From: IResearch: DevOps Application Development in China in 2020 — Original Series report by IResearch (II)
4. Policy-driven – establishment of domestic industry standards
In April 2018, the DevOps standard project “R&d Operation Integration Capability Maturity Model” was successfully approved by China Communication Standardization Association.
From: IResearch: DevOps Application Development in China in 2020 — Original Series report by IResearch (II)
5. Ecologically driven — Open source community
The growing open source ecosystem provides development and operations engineers with a variety of tools to choose from, creating a rich resource pool for DevOps.
From: IResearch: DevOps Application Development in China in 2020 — Original Series report by IResearch (II)
The internal environment
To judge the internal environment, decision makers can consider the following aspects. If more than a third of the situation has already occurred in the enterprise, decision makers should start to consider DevOps.
personnel
- Recruitment is not going well.
- Employee turnover is frequent, and new and old employees’ abilities are stagnant.
- Employees work overtime frequently, and business progress is not good.
- There is internal competition between teams, which wastes human resources.
- The proportion of internal cadres being promoted is low.
product
- Product innovation is stagnant and business expansion is slow.
- Product automation line is missing, frequent accidents occur.
- Internal product homogeneity occurs.
- Product costs remain high.
assessment
- The internal technology/service sharing mechanism is missing.
- The internal evaluation mechanism of the enterprise is chaotic.
culture
- Corporate culture doesn’t translate into work.
Identify the problem points and choose the order of implementation
With the judgment of the internal environment, there are problem points, but solving a single point of problem is never what policymakers want to see.
And it’s hard to tell which problem to solve first seems to be the right one.
We can choose the order of implementation from the core of the enterprise/product. For example, the enterprise needs to improve the efficiency of product iteration, then the preferred order should be [automation], [evaluation] system construction.
Top-down promotion – Determines DevOps’ success or failure
We have identified the problem points, the order of implementation, and then we must promote from top to bottom. It’s hard for employees to appreciate the value of a project like this.
The result would be “perfunctory”. Because employees think it’s hard to [advance].
In the process of promotion, there will be all kinds of resistance, and only a clear “edict” can make the promotion go smoothly.
When Amazon forced its microservices architecture in 2002, CEO Jeff Bezos sent an email to everyone.
Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
The Bezos API Mandate: Amazon’s Manifesto For Externalization
Provide resources and adjust the structure
Providing resources
With a plan, providing resources is definitely essential. Currently, there are many open source & paid Agile, DevOps related products and solutions in China and abroad. We’ll cover that in a later article.
Here, we’ll just give you a selection recommendation (of course, if you’re introducing a DevOps product for investment purposes, that’s another story).
- Don’t buy all the features of onestop in one go.
- Choose cloud native, K8S original products.
- Choose products that have an open source base.
- Don’t let the introduction of DevOps products get stuck in technology upgrades.
- Product + instruction + training is a must.
- Listen to employee experience and word of mouth before deciding.
Adjust the architecture
The next step is to adjust the architecture accordingly. For teams not familiar with DevOps, there must be several roles in the company.
It’s almost impossible to promote DevOps without one of the following roles in the organization, and relying solely on products from third-party companies won’t do the trick.
- DevOps communicator teams: It takes a team or individual to innovate and set the bar for the business to be copied.
- Automation Architect: A person/team that can automate the architecture of processes, tests, etc., based on business attributes.
- R&d + Test Engineer: Every R&D/test should be transformed gradually.
- Quality + safety assessment team: preferably composed of r&d personnel.
- Utility evaluation team: evaluators of new technologies and new tools.
Evaluate the result and give affirmation
According to Atlassian’s assessment, DevOps adoption takes about a year for overseas companies, so decision-makers need to anticipate the time frame.
Team leaders need to report DevOps progress based on actual data. A few examples:
- Percentage of deployment build automation
- Test automation percent
- Percentage of Blocking time & Waiting time cost
- User feedback on the product
In addition, it is important to give credit to the team/employees who do DevOps, otherwise no one will want to do something that the boss doesn’t approve of.
conclusion
We analyzed the role of decision makers in DevOps promotion from a macro perspective.
Going back to our two previous articles, employees, leaders, and decision makers should all invest in DevOps, otherwise it’s just a vanity project.
| role | understand |
|---|---|
| Decision makers | The person in charge of the direction should determine the implementation sequence, provide resources, adjust the structure, evaluate and affirm according to the situation of the enterprise. |
| Leader | The person who makes the rules, the person who implements them, needs to specify, change, evaluate the rules according to the team. The Leader needs toCAMSAnd the actual situation of the team, building team culture, automation, evaluation system, sharing system. |
| employees | Follow a rule, take a set of tools, follow a process, and be open to change to improve your capabilities. |
We’ll go into the details of DevOps in a future article.