DevOps Maturity Model – From Traditional IT to Complete DevOps
DevOps has transformed the IT industry by changing how teams operate and collaborate in the process chain and workflow. By now, most organizations will have achieved some level of DevOps implementation in their software journey.
While there are a few in the process of understanding DevOps impact, a few are yet to realize the full DevOps potential.
But the most common misconception around DevOps adoption continues to remain, i.e., ‘understanding it as a journey or a destination’.
This is what the ‘DevOps Maturity Model’ precisely speaks about!
Understanding DevOps Maturity
By definition, DevOps Maturity is described as a model that determines an organization’s standing in principles of DevOps journey along with deciding what more to be accomplished to achieve the desired results.
Understanding DevOps adoption ‘as a continuous journey, not a destination’ stands crucial to achieving DevOps maturity.
The majority of DevOps monitoring solutions are compatible with on-premise, cloud, and containerized infrastructure, which ensures a smooth DevOps transformation process.
The DevOps maturity model determines growth through continuous learning from both teams and organizational perspectives. More the capabilities and skills, more will be the ability to handle issues of scale and complexities.
As the experts recommend, organizational DevOps maturity can be gauged by their abilities in the following four areas:
1) Culture and Strategy
DevOps has to be understood as a culture-driven approach that brings together different teams, driving them towards a common objective. Transition to DevOps operating model means a transformation in the organization’s operating culture backed by a set of policies and process frameworks. So, that needs proper planning and perfect strategy.
2) Automation
Automation is key to continuous delivery and continuous deployment tools in the DevOps process. By automating repetitive tasks, the automation process eases development, testing and production in a DevOps cycle, thus saving time and enhancing resource efficiency.
3) Structure and Process
Modern-day IT functioning is process-oriented and involves processes across all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This has advanced in a DevOps environment, where every stage is a set of procedures in line with corporate policies and business objectives.
4) Collaboration and Sharing
This is the most critical aspect of principles of DevOps culture. Collaboration and sharing are key to DevOps and teams (on the same location or a different location) will need to align tools and resources towards achieving common goals and objectives.
According to Forbes research, organizations commonly find themselves in one of the following stages as part of their DevOps operational model journey:
- Unconscious incompetence: Organizations fail to understand DevOps challenges and its advantages
- Conscious incompetence: Organizations still see siloed processes even after 12-18 months of DevOps journey with some automation
- Conscious competence: After four years of DevOps implementation journey and successful automation, organizations focus on collaboration across teams and streamline sharing mechanism
- Unconscious competence: Here, organizations are all set with structured frameworks, in-depth collaboration, the concrete process for effective sharing
What Makes a DevOps Maturity Model?
A perfect DevOps maturity model determines DevOps maturity in three ways:
- Assessment of the current state of capabilities
- Identifying areas of improvement
- Outlining steps to achieve desired DevOps goals
In line with these three steps, the DevOps maturity block verifies maturity in building, deploying and testing stages across application, data and infrastructure levels:
1) DevOps Maturity for Application – Determines DevOps maturity by the ease in code movement from Development to Production phase. Achieving this requires having builds, tests, code coverage, security scans and monitoring as automated components of the deployment pipeline.
2) DevOps Maturity by Data – Determines DevOps maturity by ability to clear path to automate changes to data and validate functionality regularly, through DataOps.
3) DevOps Maturity by Infrastructure – Determines DevOps maturity by ability to ease infrastructure using capabilities around automation, streamlining and enabling self-service to provision environments, among other tasks.
Summarized, DevOps Maturity model involves five transformation stages:
1) Stage-1: Initial
Traditional environment with Dev and Ops separated is handled.
2) Stage-2: Managed
The beginning of change mindset focused on agility in Dev and initial automation in Ops, with emphasis on collaboration.
3) Stage-3: Defined
Organization-wide transformation begins with defined processes and established automation.
4) Stage-4: Measured
A better understanding of process and automation, followed by continuous improvement.
5) Stage-5: Optimized
Achievements are visible, team gaps disappear, and employees gain recognition.
While these 5 stages make a complete DevOps maturity model, it’s imperative for enterprises to keep checking their maturity at every step, and eventually identify focus areas and ways to evolve in the overall journey.
What to Measure in a DevOps Maturity Model?
There are a set of parameters to be measured at every stage of the DevOps Maturity Model to confirm an organization’s level of DevOps maturity. These measures ideally define the direction the organization is advancing in its DevOps implementation journey. They are:
- Number of completed projects and the release frequency should ideally high resulting in ROI
- Percentage of successful deployments should maintain an edge over unsuccessful ones
- Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) from an unexpected incident/failure from the time of occurrence, should be nil or as low as possible
- Lead time, from development of code to deployment in production, should be satisfactory
- Deployment frequency to determine the frequency of new code deployments
The stage-wise process and the above parameters define an organization’s DevOps maturity success.
DevOps Maturity Linked to Security
DevOps maturity is directly linked to DevOps security. As organizations progress in DevOps journey, the competitive edge becomes a pressing demand calling for faster release cycles and digital innovation demands a strong pitch.
Development, operations, and security are the three words that make up the DevOps security concept. The objective is to eliminate any barriers that might exist between IT operations and software development.
This is where the challenge of security starts becoming more serious and which is why DevOps culture calls for reconsidering security practices.
Eventually, organizations will have to make security an integral part of their DevOps process and take it closer to all application development stages.
DevOps experts work with security personnel for early security integration at the maturity level across all parts of the Software Development Lifecycle.
This can happen through effective DevSecOps implementation. solutions like Containerization can also help to some extent in addressing issues continuously by limiting the vulnerable resources.
Moreover, Security and DevOps teams can collaborate in applying security policies and frameworks to all the DevOps tools and resources.
Business Benefits of DevOps Maturity
Giving a complete picture of an organization’s DevOps team standing, the DevOps maturity model presents a wide range of business benefits:
- Faster adaptability to change
- Ability to tap opportunities
- Identifying areas of fulfillment
- Improved scalability
- Operational efficiency
- Increased delivery speeds
- Enhanced quality
More such benefits of DevOps are part of the Maturity model that gives you the ability to witness the full DevOps potential.
DevOps Best Practices
Making the switch to DevOps offers numerous advantages. Despite having innovative approaches to improve the processes, DevOps challenges won’t be entirely new. The following are some of the DevOps best practices
1) Collaborating teams
2) Continuous Integration (CI)
3) Continuous Development (CD)
4) Continuous Testing
5) Customer Satisfaction
6) Effective Leadership
7) Effective Tools
In Conclusion
Businesses must keep in mind that DevOps is a long-term commitment and not an overnight procedure as they progress in their DevOps transformation journey. DevOps Maturity increases your overall organizational workflow, enhances release frequency and minimizes time-to-market, thus giving you a competitive edge! Want to witness the full DevOps potential through DevOps Maturity Model? ‘Explore Veritis, the Stevie Awards winner for the DevOps Consulting services
DevOps Maturity Model – FAQs
DevOps Maturity is described as a model that determines an organization’s standing in DevOps journey along with deciding what more to be accomplished to achieve the desired results.
The DevOps maturity model determines growth through continuous learning from both teams and organizational perspectives.
There are five phases of DevOps maturity. First one is Initial where Dev and Ops are separately handled. Second phase is Managed where the agility is imbued in Development element and automation is started in the Ops element.
Effectively it brings them together. Defined is third phase which lends the companies to define their processes and automations. Measured which is fourth phase where the metrics and other gauges are established by company. Optimized is the final phase where whatever’s been completed is optimized and this stage is where the gaps between Dev and Ops erase and unite them as DevOps .
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