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Tag: standardization

  • Challenges in DevOps Standardization

    Challenges in DevOps Standardization

    Many organizations still face challenges in their Devops adoption journey enterprise-wide, especially when there is no standardization in tools, non-repeatable processes and adhoc practices and culture barriers. Here are some of the challenges in standardization and possible solutions to achieve standardization in DevOps as part of DevOps transformation journey.

    Business Case

    A survey conducted within multiple customer teams revealed they face challenges in standardization of tools and streamlining the process gaps due to lack of end-to-end orchestration, manual intervention, legacy practices, inconsistent environments, longer provisioning time and several other factors. Taken together, they necessitate standardization in DevOps across the enterprise to make it repeatable, predictable and consistent.

    Challenges in Standardization of DevOps

    Tools Challenges

    1. Multiple tools to evaluate with one or more overlapping features in the tools, learning curve involved to evaluate/do proof of concept and choosing the tools with short-term goals instead of long-term perspective.
    2. Limited knowledge of tools, used from the perspective of automation in their specific area, resulting in siloed automation and using manual, ad hoc process.
    3. Lack of out-of-box integration with most tools used in the CD pipeline and teams investing time to build custom integrations.

    Process Challenges

    1. There is no central DevOps team who can evaluate and recommend the right set of tools to be used, with individual project teams/groups try to set up their desired tools and serve their teams (Dev/QA/Ops), with no clarity on availability of infrastructure that can be shared across groups.
    2. There is no defined process framework detailing the different tenets in DevOps, including what activities and approach are needed to move to desired state, leaving teams to achieve their desired state of automation without a structured approach.
    3. There is a lack of knowledge on defining right KPI for each DevOps capability and how to measure the metrics to determine efficiency of the DevOps automation process and identify scope of optimization.
    4. There is a lack of SME knowledge on the application, application stack and environment management flowing between Dev and Ops teams to arrive at a standardized process.
    5. Multiple vendors are managing the different stages of an application and each following their own defined process for development life cycle.

    Cultural Challenges

    1. Standardization on metrics, process, practices, governance and organization-level control over DevOps implementation is challenging without a central authority (a central DevOps team) driving these practices across the enterprise.
    2. Teams operate in silos and follow their own DevOps practices and think in silos without having a holistic view, resulting in broken processes that are inconsistent.
    3. Teams still lack training in DevOps on the tools, practices to be followed in CI, continuous testing, continuous deployment and operations. Lack of DevOps skilled resources/expertise brings challenges in implementing end-to-end automation.
    4. DevOps is considered a concept, with every DevOps implementation unique for every organization and no standard approach for adoption of DevOps, causing confusion where to start and how to start. In addition, there is a conflict of interest and power of influence from multiple stakeholders while standardizing on tools.

    Proposed Solution(s)

    DevOps Adoption Framework (DAF)

    DevOps adoption framework (DAF) is a comprehensive framework for due-diligence, tools support and solution accelerators to create systematic and well planned-out transition road map and implement a continuous delivery toolchain and overcome the common challenges in DevOps implementation.

    Choosing the Right Set of Tools and Stack

    Tools selection should be based on the requirements and what best suits the need, decided based on various factors discussed in the attached whitepaper, and using one of the methodologies such as points given for out of box features and different factors/constraints.

    DevOps Automation Platform with Template-Based Infrastructure and Toolchain Orchestration

    DAAS (DevOps as a service) is an automation platform, which serves as a central platform to drive standardization across tool use, provisioning infrastructure, toolchain, managing the life cycle of VMs, bringing in central authority and governance, defining the KPI, monitoring and measuring the metrics, monitoring end-to-end pipeline giving real time analytics, providing self-service capabilities across multiple teams, bringing in audit and compliance, continuous improvement and drive consolidation and standardization.

    Future Direction

    • Increased focus on standardization of DevOps metrics with analytics and monitoring to identify the bottlenecks early and big data used for predictive analytics through the delivery pipeline.
    • Rapid DevOps adoption across the enterprise, with standardization and consolidation critical factors for scale, compliance and utilization with self-service DevOps automation platform enabling end-to-end pipelines.

    Conclusion

    The critical success factors for enabling DevOps adoption across enterprise needs focus on central DevOps team driving DevOps adoption with governance enabled with DevOps adoption framework and consolidation of the processes, standardization on metrics and tools, enabled with a DevOps automation platform.

    For a deeper look at the survey, download the white paper here.

    About the Author / Lavanya Subbarayalu

    Lavanya Subbarayalu is Senior Architect working with Technology Office in HCL Technologies. She has expertise in Azure, DevOps consulting & Microsoft technologies. She is associated with DevOps COE, working on design and Development of DevOps solutions and consulting tools. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

  • DevOps Debates: The Benefits of Tool Standardization

    DevOps Debates: The Benefits of Tool Standardization

    As my role demands, I work with various large enterprises looking at implementing DevOps to improve their software delivery cycle times. I have seen many strategies being adopted by them—some working, and some not working yet. I have pulled together some of the more common ones so we could debate them to see if these indeed are worth looking at. With that, I kick off my “DevOps Debates” series.

    The first one on the list is a popular one: If you want to create anything in large volumes, you need to standardize the manufacturing process. That makes it easier to understand what is going on, control the quality and later change processes if necessary. This is happening in a similar fashion for software delivery processes and in DevOps.

    Standardization techniques adopted in many large enterprises often include standardizing the toolset used by software developers. To do this, companies create a centralized tools group or software center of excellence (COE), which tries to find the best tool for the company and then implements and manages it for the teams. The intent is to streamline DevOps implementation across the board by having a common DevOps platform that hooks into these standardized tools, delivering common practices and reporting.

    I have seen and heard a lot of emotional discussion on this. Here is my go, for and against the topic. Your thoughts are most welcome!

    For Standardization:

    1. Centralized teams can take a global view of how things are being used across the organization. As such, they are better placed to push best practices where necessary and learn best practices when they need to. This helps in picking the right set of tools.
    2. Centralized teams can create a generic DevOps platform that can serve the needs of the organization across all groups. They then can help bring a DevOps focus and manage budget centrally.
    3. Standardization helps organizations streamline license cost to optimize software use.
    4. Small teams focusing on DevOps may not have the muscle power or the budget to create a momentum needed for adoption. Running a central body for such implementations helps.

    Against Standardization:

    1. DevOps is still evolving—standardizing may be detrimental to the innovation process that needs to happen within the tools and needs ecosystem.
    2. Developers from various teams driving a DevOps implementation will be more successful; they can solve the issues “on the ground” rather than a central team trying to understand and then implementing a solution.
    3. Some tools are good for a specific use and may not be used companywide. Standardization may reduce productivity.
    4. Developers are the users of the tools—they need the freedom to choose what they want to use. Standardizing won’t allow them that freedom, which may upset them and, in turn, lead to decreased productivity.

    Would that then mean,

    1. While it is a good idea in the long run to standardize, is now too early to do it?
    2. Would it be better to create a DevOps platform that can provide multiple tools support while standardizing the organization’s needs?

    Thoughts?