Never Skip a Leg Day in DevOps - Part 3
Getting in Shape for DevOps
September 02, 2016

Mark Heistek
Devopsense

Start with Never Skip a Leg Day in DevOps - Part 1

Start with Never Skip a Leg Day in DevOps - Part 2

The Muscle Groups of a DevOps Transition

When you start to work out in order to get your body and mind in shape, you need to know why you want to do it, how you want to do it and what you need to do. In my case it was:

WHY: Become the best goalkeeper in the competition in order to become champion with my squad.

HOW: Get to a certain level of physical strength and mental well being.

WHAT: Follow a balanced routine to train all muscle groups based on best practices and with help of professionals.

By answering the why, how, what questions I had a clear understanding of how to achieve my goals. The injuries were caused by an incomplete view of what to do to reach my goals. I was optimizing the upper body and neglected my legs. I did not reach out to good trainers to help me to understand my "why" translating this to my "how" and "what".

The neglection of "legs" or "skipping the leg day" happens a lot in companies where they transform towards a DevOps organization. I am going to explain this based on the pillars or "muscles groups" of a DevOps transition.

To transform towards a DevOps organization you need to cover all DevOps "muscle groups". Let's dive into these groups.

Company Organization
Profit driven towards Culture-Purpose driven

Purpose driven companies gives them the ability to measure customer satisfaction. Well defined measures give manageability and therefore a feedback loop to learn and improve your product or product delivery. If you are not purpose driven you can cannot measure progress of your product.

For more insights I'd like to refer to this Financial Times' article of Simon Caulkin.

Work Methodology
Waterfall structure towards Agile/Scrum

The waterfall methodology of building software products can be compared by constructing buildings.

■ You analyse what to do and arrange budget for developing the building

■ You hire a few architects to design the whole building

■ You hire a construction company to build the building based on the design and specifications

■ Finally you open the doors and hand over the keys to the new residents

This process can take months or years.

Since software products need to change rapidly to meet customer needs and external circumstances, the waterfall methodology takes too much time.

You need to move away from creating big blocks of software and start to deliver small products which can be improved based on customer feedback. An Scrum framework can be used to achieve this. Working is short periods to shorten the feedback loop.

Implementation of the Product
Manual delivery towards Continuous Delivery

Delivering increments to add value to your product means doing the same process over and over again. This can result in dull and repetitive manual work. There is also a huge possibility of making mistakes.

Tools to build, test and deploy your software can do the dull and repetitive work for you. They'll do it faster, make no mistakes and therefore a higher quality.

By automating the delivery process you can reuse the process as much as you like and get instant feedback, so you can immediately respond to improve the product.

Architecture
Monolith towards Micro Services

Creating changes to a monolith application can have a huge negative impact to your product. A monolith application is build with many dependencies, so it is hard to change just a small part without taking into account the effect on other parts in the application. It can break quickly.

Breaking down your application towards micro services makes it much easier to make small changes. When it breaks it will not affect other micro services, so your application will just not work in a small part. Benefit of this you can do changed independently and when it breaks, you can fix it quickly.

Environment
Autocratic towards Autonomy

Delegate to the team. Do not tell how to do stuff, but coach them to improve themselves, so they can improve the product. Let the team decide how to change the product. Give trust to the team and give them time to proof this trust.

If you want to get better in doing things better, you need to fail and learn. Failing is not an option, it is a must.

You Can't Change Overnight - It Takes Time and It Will Hurt

The change towards an Agile organization with a DevOps mindset is a natural one. It can not be captured in processes and procedures.

DevOps is more than just a way to build better and faster software/products. It's more than just a cultural shift in the way we work. DevOps is a self-organizing force that becomes part of your company DNA, driving complete organizational change. Therefore you can never skip a leg day in DevOps. All muscle groups matter and it will make your company a better athlete, increase its range of motion, reduce its risk of injury, improve its balance and it will run faster and longer.

Practice every day. Take small steps. Fall, get up, learn and get better.

Mark Heistek is Head of Delivery and Founder of Devopsense.

Share this

Industry News

October 03, 2023

Parasoft announced new advancements in its Continuous Quality Platform for functional solutions, which include Parasoft Virtualize, SOAtest, CTP, and DTP.

The latest releases introduce capabilities including:

- GenAI integration for API testing

- Comprehensive microservices code coverage

- Web accessibility testing

- Powerful learning mode for creating and updating virtual assets

These innovations are set to transform the landscape of software testing for enterprise application development and test teams.

October 03, 2023

LinearB announced the release of free DORA Metrics dashboards.

October 03, 2023

PerfectScale, a provider of Kubernetes optimization, has successfully closed $7.1 million in seed funding.

October 02, 2023

Spectro Cloud announced Palette EdgeAI to simplify how organizations deploy and manage AI workloads at scale across simple to complex edge locations, such as retail, healthcare, industrial automation, oil and gas, automotive/connected cars, and more.

September 28, 2023

Kong announced Kong Konnect Dedicated Cloud Gateways, the simplest and most cost-effective way to run Kong Gateways in the cloud fully managed as a service and on enterprise dedicated infrastructure.

September 28, 2023

Sisense unveiled the public preview of Compose SDK for Fusion.

September 28, 2023

Cloudflare announced Hyperdrive to make every local database global. Now developers can easily build globally distributed applications on Cloudflare Workers, the serverless developer platform used by over one million developers, without being constrained by their existing infrastructure.

September 27, 2023

Kong announced full support for Kong Mesh in Konnect, making Kong Konnect an API lifecycle management platform with built-in support for Kong Gateway Enterprise, Kong Ingress Controller and Kong Mesh via a SaaS control plane.

September 27, 2023

Vultr announced the launch of the Vultr GPU Stack and Container Registry to enable global enterprises and digital startups alike to build, test and operationalize artificial intelligence (AI) models at scale — across any region on the globe. \

September 27, 2023

Salt Security expanded its partnership with CrowdStrike by integrating the Salt Security API Protection Platform with the CrowdStrike Falcon® Platform.

September 26, 2023

Progress announced a partnership with Software Improvement Group (SIG), an independent technology and advisory firm for software quality, security and improvement, to help ensure the long-term maintainability and modernization of business-critical applications built on the Progress® OpenEdge® platform.

September 26, 2023

Solace announced a new version of its Solace Event Portal solution that gives organizations with Apache Kafka deployments better visibility into, and control over, their Kafka event streams, brokers and associated assets.

September 26, 2023

Reply launched a proprietary framework for generative AI-based software development, KICODE Reply.

September 26, 2023

Harness announced the industry-wide Engineering Excellence Collective™, an engineering leadership community.

September 25, 2023

Harness announced four new product modules on the Harness platform.