What is the cost of DevOps?
In contemplating DevOps, rather than asking “What’s it going to cost?” organization leaders must ask “What will be the cost of NOT doing this?”
Getting leadership buy-in is critical to any development project. However, initial support will be deemed meaningless if your process leads to a failed release. The pain from a failed release can range from minor inconveniences and short-term down time stemming from an internal application outage to significant financial and reputational damage associated with a public facing site outage.
In addition, without DevOps, every new release requires significantly more hours of labor, thus incurring higher operating expenses. Furthermore, manual methodologies of code deployment do not typically allow for automated testing yet often do require extensive documentation and skills training, which may not be part of the teams’ core job function.
Out with the old, in with the new
For most companies the process of releasing new systems or applications – internal or external – is an intensive, manual endeavor. With a lot of tribal knowledge baked in, these organically grown systems become inherently fragile, prone to errors and reliant on key personnel to execute every release. In order to shift to DevOps, you must first shed light on the good, the bad and ugly of your current process for addressing:
- New features / bugs that need attention
- Scope and prioritization for new development
- Code saves
- Code builds
- Deployment
- QA action and process
- Release to production
- Validating success
Once the current process is mapped out, you need to design an “ideal state” DevOps pipeline. While it’s not something any organization can expect to achieve immediately, it is important to formally state this goal, which will include: requirement gathering, development, source control, build process, testing, release and continuous improvement.
The End Game
DevOps is often a project that sounds great, but because it entails a cultural shift within an organization, it can be challenging to get off the ground. By setting expectations and promoting the benefits of the end goal – streamlined development cycles, fewer deployment failures, faster recovery and cost reductions – IT leaders can gain support from those who will be using the tools and from those who will by paying the bills. With the organization on board and measurable steps in place, you can carve out specific functions, focus on automation and continually improve the development process. Remember you don’t have to do everything at once, but by adopting a cross-functional development culture, it won’t take long for your organization to realize the benefits of devotion to DevOps.