4 Ways to Scale DevOps in 2021

January is a month often dedicated to planning, setting intentions and preparing ourselves professionally and personally for a fresh year. In my own capacity as a DevOps and SRE leader, many of the clients I work with will reinvigorate internal efforts to streamline how they work in Q1.

I often advise clients to make very concrete goals and milestones for their technology organizations to become more agile, streamlined and modernized. Setting these goals is helpful to articulate to the wider business where you want to go and how you plan to get there. Here are a few DevOps-related initiatives your team may want to tackle in the first half of this year.

#1: Tighten Security through DevOps

Securing your organization’s infrastructure is an evergreen priority for technology leaders. When done properly, security should be baked into all DevOps processes (sometimes called DevSecOps) from the design phase all the way to application maintenance. To be effective and not slow down development, security processes need to move at the speed of today’s fast-moving environments, which is near impossible, or, at least very challenging, unless security is well automated.

Automated security measures can be applied to the full life cycle of product development and should make development time faster and smoother in the long run if you can catch vulnerabilities early. Identify automation tools that work for your team and experiment with what works best.

Similarly, in fast-moving environments, it’s tempting to play fast and loose with privileged access to unblock individuals and teams. Lax policies for user rights exposes the organization to too much risk from potential hackers. Implement a solution or protocol to keep access controlled. Policy and governance are critical for well-rounded DevSecOps. Communicate policies regularly with the entire organization. Ensure that all engineers know how to comply and enforce them.

#2: Make DevOps an Organizational Culture

Much like security, DevOps needs to evolve from an individual role to a cross-functional, holistic, cultural approach to developing software. Organizations should foster a DevOps culture rather than identifying specific individuals in DevOps roles.

So how do you know when this culture shift has happened? A good pulse check is to see how quickly your company can adapt to change. How mired is your team in legacy code or infrastructure? Can individual teams operate autonomously? Teams and individuals that are independent and accountable are able to continuously experiment and learn at a much faster rate.

DevOps cultural transformation won’t happen overnight – but it can be expedited if embraced by the entire company. I typically advise companies to focus on making incremental, consistent progress that builds autonomy, trust and transparency. These are the building blocks of a thriving DevOps culture.

#3: Simplify Your Infrastructure

Complexity, over time, creates duplication, unnecessary systems and technical debt. All of these have a cost, and create security vulnerabilities. Create organizational goals to clean up and reduce complexity. I often suggest teams create a roadmap to move toward self-service and building platforms. As you focus on building a DevOps organizational culture, you will likely notice that teams will identify opportunities to simplify and standardize, which will also remove complexity.

#4 Review system SLAs and SLOs

Establishing and monitoring key metrics are a fundamental part of any SRE role. Service level agreements (SLAs) and service level objectives (SLOs) need to be defined and monitored to ensure your team is fulfilling them. System availability (uptime, latency, etc) is core to any cloud SRE team. Define what reliability means for your organization. January is a good time of year to start fresh and articulate these metrics, how they relate to your core business and what investments or changes need to be made to achieve them.