If you moved to the cloud to take advantage of rapid infrastructure deployment and development support, you understand the power of quickly bringing applications to market. Gaining a competitive edge is all about driving customer value fast. Immersing a company in a DevOps transformation is one of the best ways to achieve speed and performance.

In this blog post, we’re building on the insights of Harish Jayakumar, Senior Manager of Application Modernization and Solutions Engineering at Google, and Joey Yore, Manager, and Principal Consultant at 2nd Watch. See how the highest performing teams in the DevOps space are achieving strong availability, agility, and profitability with application development according to key four metrics. Understand the challenges, solutions, and potential outcomes before starting your own DevOps approach to accelerating app development.

Hear Harish and Joey on the 2nd Watch Cloud Crunch podcast, 5 Strategies to Maximize Your Cloud’s Value: Strategy 2 – Accelerating Application Development with DevOps  

What is DevOps?

Beyond the fact that DevOps combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), DevOps is pretty hard to define. Harish thinks the lack of a clinical, agreed-upon definition is by design. “I think everyone is still learning how to get better at building and operating software.” With that said, he describes his definition of DevOps as, “your software delivery velocity, and the reliability of it. It’s basically a cultural and organizational moment that aims to increase software reliability and velocity.”

The most important thing to remember about a DevOps transformation and the practices and principles that make it possible is culture. At its core, DevOps is a cultural shift. Without embracing, adopting, and fostering a DevOps culture, none of the intended outcomes are possible.

Within DevOps there are five key principles to keep top of mind:

1. Reduce organizational silos
2. Accept failure as the norm
3. Implement gradual changes
4. Leverage tooling and automation
5. Measure

Measuring DevOps: DORA and CALMS

Google acquired DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in 2018 and relies on the methodology developed from DORA’s annual research to measure DevOps performance. “DORA follows a very strong data-driven approach that helps teams leverage their automation process, cultural changes, and everything around it,” explains Harish. Fundamental to DORA are four key metrics that offer a valid and reliable way to measure the research and analysis of any kind of software delivery performance. These metrics gauge the success of DevOps transformations from ‘low performers’ to ‘elite performers’.

1. Deployment frequency: How often is the organization successfully released to production
2. Lead time for changes: The amount of time it takes a commit to get into production
3. Change failure rate: The percentage of deployments causing a failure in production
4. Time to restore service: How long it takes to recover from a failure in production

DORA is similar to the CALMS model which addresses the five fundamental elements of DevOps starting with where the enterprise is today and continuing throughout the transformation. CALMS also uses the four key metrics identified by DORA to evaluate DevOps performance and delivery. The acronym stands for:

Culture: Is there a collaborative and customer-centered culture across all functions?

Automation: Is automation being used to remove toil or wasted work?

Lean: Is the team agile and scrappy with a focus on continuous improvement?

Measurement: What, how, and against what benchmarks is data being measured?

Sharing: To what degree are teams teaching, sharing, and contributing to cross-team collaboration?

DevOps Goals: Elite Performance for Meaningful Business Impacts

Based on the metrics above, organizations fall into one of four levels: low, medium, high, or elite performers. The aspiration to achieve elite performance is driven by the significant business impact these teams have on their overall organization. According to Harish, and based on research by the DORA team at Google, “It’s proven that elite performers in the four key metrics are 3.56 times more likely to have a stronger availability practice. There’s a strong correlation between these elite performers and the business impact of the organization that they’re a part of. ”

He goes on to say, “High performers are more agile. We’ve seen 46 times more frequent deployments from them. And it’s more reliable. They are five times more likely to exceed any profitability, market share, or productivity goals on it.” Being able to move quickly enables these organizations to deliver features faster, and thus increase their edge or advantage over competitors.

Focusing on the five key principles of DevOps is critical for going from ideation to implementation at a speed that yields results. High and elite performers are particularly agile with their use of technology. When a new technology is available, DevOps teams need to be able to test, apply, and utilize it quickly. With the right tools, teams are alerted immediately to code breaks and where that code resides. Using continuous testing, the team can patch code before it affects other systems. The results are improved code quality and accelerated, efficient recovery. You can see how each pillar of DevOps – from culture and agility to technology and measurement, feeds into one another to deliver high levels of performance, solid availability, and uninterrupted continuity.

Overcoming Common DevOps Challenges

Because culture is so central to a DevOps transformation, most challenges can be solved through cultural interventions. Like any cultural change, there must first be buy-in and adoption from the top down. Leadership plays a huge role in setting the tone for the cultural shift and continuously supporting an environment that embraces and reinforces the culture at every level. Here are some ways to influence an organization’s cultural transformation for DevOps success.

• Build lean teams: Small teams are better enabled to deliver the speed, innovation, and agility necessary to achieve across DevOps metrics.
• Enable and encourage transparency: Joey says, “Having those big siloed teams, where there’s a database team, the development team, the ops team – it’s really, anti-DevOps. What you want to start doing is making cross-functional teams to better aid in knocking down those silos to improve deployment metrics.”
• Create continuous feedback loops: Among lean, transparent teams there should be a constant feedback loop of information sharing to influence smarter decision making, decrease redundancy, and build on potential business outcomes.
• Reexamine accepted protocols: Always be questioning the organizational and structural processes, procedures, and systems that the organization grows used to. For example, how long does it take to deploy one line of change? Do you do it repeatedly? How long does it take to patch and deploy after discovering a security vulnerability? If it’s five days, why is it five days? How can you shorten that time? What technology, automation, or tooling can increase efficiency?
• Measure, measure, measure: Utilize DORAs research to establish elite performance benchmarks and realistic upward goals. Organizations should always be identifying barriers to achievement and continuously improving on measurements toward improvement.
• Aim for total performance improvements: Organizations often think they need to choose between performance metrics. For example, in order to influence speed, stability may be negatively affected. Harish says, “Elite performers don’t see trade-offs,” and points to best practices like CICD, agile development, and tests, built-in automation, standardized platform and processes, and automated environment provisioning for comprehensive DevOps wins.

• Work small: Joey says, “In order to move faster, be more agile, and accelerate deployment, you’re naturally going to be working with smaller pieces with more automated testing. Whenever you’re making changes on these smaller pieces, you’re actually lowering your risk for anyone’s deployment to cause some sort of catastrophic failure. And if there is a failure, it’s easy to recover. Minimizing risk per change is a very important component of DevOps.”

Learn more about avoiding common DevOps issues by downloading our eBook, 7 Major Roadblocks in DevOps Adoption and How to Address Them

Ready to Start Your DevOps Transformation?

Both Harish and Joey agree that the best approach to starting your own DevOps transformation is one based on DevOps – start small. The first step is to compile a small team to work on a small project as an experiment. Not only will it help you understand the organization’s current state, but it helps minimize risk to the organization as a whole. Step two is to identify what your organization and your DevOps team are missing. Whether it’s technology and tooling or internal expertise, you need to know what you don’t know to avoid regularly running into the same issues.

Finally, you need to build those missing pieces to set the organization up for success. Utilize training and available technology to fill in the blanks, and partner with a trusted DevOps expert who can guide you toward continuous optimization.

2nd Watch provides Application Modernization and DevOps Services to customize digital transformations. Start with our free online assessment to see how your application modernization maturity compares to other enterprises. Then let 2nd Watch complete a DevOps Transformation Assessment to help develop a strategy for the application and implementation of DevOps practices. The assessment includes analysis using the CALMS model, identification of software development and level of DevOps maturity, and delivering tools and processes for developing and embracing DevOps strategies.