7 Lessons on Maturing DevOps in Enterprises

If you are trying to implement devops in a larger IT organization, please give a listen to my recent podcast on Gigaom's Voices in DevOps A Conversation with Isaac Sacolick.

DevOps largely came from startups that wanted to break the cultural and practice separation between Dev and Ops. Dev teams want to iterate and deploy changes quickly, while operating teams must ensure reliable and compliant environments. Automation, and alignment on goals, and collaboration are key to getting both, but, achieving this in compliant-driven enterprises isn't trivial. Implementing DevOps in these organizations requires a different strategy than what startups can do.

Here are some quotes I picked out from the thirty minute podcast. Please give it a listen for the full context and more insights.

• I haven't met a single IT leader, CIO, or digital leader, that comes up and says, "Oh yeah things are easy. I have plenty of resources and skills and there's no demanding requirements."
• I also don't hear CIOs coming to me and saying, “You know what? We've got this legacy stuff and we've got all these new applications to do. Our budgets are significantly increasing so that we can do both.”
• An enterprise that decides to go a full pedal into CICD and doesn't think through the testing ramifications - that may not work so well compared to a startup that can fail faster with and adjust their testing strategy.
• If you do not invest in DevOps in parallel to that is that over time that agile team is spending less and less time on application development and spending more time on the operating side.
• If you were building up standard automated ways to do your deployments, standard automated ways to do testing and a healthy way of introducing technical debt priorities on top of your business priorities, then you're less likely to see that application become legacy platforms. 
• It says “seize the day” and it's really about Ops really understanding and working with more of these [DevOps] technologies than what Dev is doing.
• If I were to pick one place to start, that I see people leaving behind. I really like teams starting out with testing.

Happy listening!