DevOps is an interesting movement. As with any effort of this magnitude, there will be many opinions on what is entailed in adoption and implementation. The issue is that businesses are so diverse and varied in culture that no single method for adoption is guaranteed to fit all businesses. In large IT organizations, this issue is additionally hampered by the fact that multiple cultures and dominions exist.
Thus, I am not a believer that DevOps adoption comes from the approach that the business commits to adopting DevOps. The business has committed to many initiatives over time that have not panned out. This is not necessarily failure, but perhaps just shifting priorities, shifting political landscape, lack of training or simply a lack of desire to change. “The best laid plans of mice and men ….” and all.
If commitment is not hampered by people, then there’s a good chance that DevOps adoption may be hampered by silos. This does not make silos our enemy. Silos help to compartmentalize and provide focus. Still, silos limit the ability to orchestrate process without involvement and participation from each of the silos.
Regardless of the reason, the challenge stands, how to align a process without the use of force. The answer is protocol. With protocol, an individual or group does not need to buy into the entire process, but just needs to understand their role. Short of incompetence or insubordination, or even both, which will eventually result in the removal of these particular types of hurdles, following protocol ensures that every role in an activity will complete their action and, thereby, facilitate the whole with roughly an 80% success rate.
I posit that the service is the means for defining protocol and of communicating that protocol into an IT organization, such that DevOps is the natural activity and outcome. A proper service entails defining a number attributes, for example:
- Metered
- Valued (priced)
- Advertised / Catalogued
- Governed
- Monitored
- Supported
- Documented
- Quality
- Available
- Intuitive
It is up to each area of IT participating in the DevOps process—Design, Develop, Test, Stage, Deploy, Operate—to contribute to defining and providing their completed artifacts that pertain to formulation of the service. The service will guide the development in the understanding of operational characteristics and will allow operations to ensure they can deliver and support the service to the level of expectations of the consumer. Moreover, in those cases where the service is not meeting appropriate levels, it will allow them to provide development with the appropriate data and metrics to take corrective action, thus leading to fewer and shorter outages and failures.
