Gene Kim: Charting DevOps Milestones and Metrics
To advance your DevOps efforts and drive success, you need to understand precisely where you stand
February 22, 2016

Aruna Ravichandran
CA Technologies

For those of us deeply immersed in the rapidly advancing DevOps revolution, sometimes it’s hard to remember that we're still early on in this game.

As discussion of "unicorn" adopters has grown somewhat weary – given that these organizations tend to be those whose business models lend themselves to transformation – practitioners have made it abundantly clear that they seek more practical guidance as to where they should expect to find themselves on this journey.

Despite his status as one of the recognized "godfathers" of DevOps, or at the very least one of its most visible spokesman, noted entrepreneur and author Gene Kim (co-author of The Phoenix Project and other seminal works) remains intimately connected to the movement's real-world standing through his continued thought leadership work.

Based on this close connectivity to practitioners – those with both advanced and more nascent initiatives – there's perhaps no better person to ask which milestones, challenges and performance metrics represent the hallmarks of today's existing DevOps adopters.

In a recent interview, Gene shared some interesting feedback on what he's hearing out on the conference circuit and elsewhere in speaking to various stakeholders about their current DevOps strategies.


Filmed at CA World '15, the interview is definitely worth viewing in its entirety, as it touches on timely DevOps maturity topics, including:

Milestones

According to Kim, there is palpable progress being made related to the continued expansion and strategic import of DevOps adoption, namely:

■ DevOps is in fact spreading rapidly beyond the realm of unicorns –finding a home in many different types of organizations, from financial service providers to old-line product manufacturers, among others.

■ Those people spearheading and supporting DevOps transformation within their organizations are rapidly climbing the ladder, with many of the practitioners he meets being promoted and granted greater responsibility.

■ Organizations are expanding their initial (local) DevOps initiatives to take on more far-reaching (global) influence, across a broader swath of projects, with even greater impact on their overall business strategies.

Challenges

Based on some ongoing research, Kim said there are five primary challenges that most organizations are working to address today, related to:

■ Automated Testing: Practitioners are still attempting to increase the scope of automated testing to include more of their legacy assets.

■ Cultural Change: How successful organizations have been in driving transition of workflows, roles and responsibilities remains an issue.

■ Security Acceleration: Advancement of security and compliance processes remains an area where most DevOps practitioners cite the need for more work.

■ Operations 2.0: With far more IT operations work being carried out using self-service models, organizations are still working to ensure consistency.

■ Building Metrics:Organizations also remain highly focused on the creation and management of proper metrics to help assess their progress.

Metrics

In terms of leveraging metrics to deepen internal DevOps buy-in, and further drive home the overarching business case, today’s critical metrics include:

■ Lead time: Specifically, how quickly organizations can move from “code committed” through required testing cycles and into deployment.

■ Deployment rates: Obviously the endgame of DevOps is increasing responsiveness and getting apps in the hands of users more quickly.

■ Change success rates: Because DevOps isn’t only about getting releases out the door, it’s also about the overall quality of those resulting updates.

■ Mean-time-to-repair: This is another no brainer, as leveraging DevOps to find and fix emerging apps issues is at the core of the entire movement.

Worth noting, the research project that Kim is referencing, which surveyed over 20,000 organizations, also concludes that DevOps "high performers" continue to greatly outpace their peers in how they chart progress related to those metrics.

The very nature of DevOps is such that every element of the SDLC is treated like a work-in-progress. Yet, one of the critical elements of advancing your overall effort and driving success is understanding precisely where you stand.

Aruna Ravichandran is VP, Product & Solutions Marketing, DevOps, CA Technologies
Share this

Industry News

March 21, 2023

OpenText launched the latest version of ValueEdge -- an innovative modular, cloud-based DevOps and value stream management (VSM) platform.

March 21, 2023

Oracle announced the availability of Java 20, the latest version of the programming language and development platform.

March 21, 2023

Rafay Systems introduced Environment Manager, a solution that empowers enterprise platform teams to improve the developer experience by delivering self-service capabilities for provisioning full-stack environments.

March 20, 2023

To meet the growing demand for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) with global organizations, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is introducing new capabilities that can boost the reliability and efficiency of large-scale Kubernetes environments while simplifying operations and reducing costs.

March 20, 2023

Perforce Software joined the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program and listed its free Enhanced Studio Pack (ESP) in AWS Marketplace.

March 20, 2023

Aembit, an identity platform that lets DevOps and Security teams discover, manage, enforce, and audit access between federated workloads, announced its official launch alongside $16.6M in seed financing from cybersecurity specialist investors Ballistic Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures.

March 16, 2023

Hyland released Alfresco Content Services 7.0 – a cloud-native content services platform, optimized for content model flexibility and performance at scale.

March 16, 2023

CAST AI has announced the closing of a $20M investment round.

March 15, 2023

Check Point® Software Technologies introduced Infinity Global Services, an all-encompassing security solution that will empower organizations of all sizes to fortify their systems, from cloud to network to endpoint.

March 15, 2023

OpsCruise's Kubernetes and Cloud Service observability platform is certified to run on the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform.

March 14, 2023

DataOps.live released an update to the DataOps.live platform, delivering productivity for data teams.

March 14, 2023

CoreStack and Zensar announced a strategic global partnership. CoreStack will provide its AI-powered NextGen cloud governance and FinOps capabilities, complementing Zensar’s composable cloud operations offering.

March 14, 2023

Delinea introduced the Delinea Platform, a cloud-native foundation for Delinea's PAM solutions that empowers end-to-end visibility, dynamic privilege controls, and adaptive security.

March 13, 2023

Sysdig announced a new foundation that will serve as the long-term custodian of the Wireshark open source project.

March 13, 2023

Talend announced the latest update to Talend Data Fabric, its end-to-end platform for data discovery, transformation, governance, and sharing.