Phases of DevOps Adoption

06 Oct 2021

In my tenure supporting software teams and implementing DevOps, I have come to accept the following phases of adoption. This means that starting with a development team performing legacy development and deployment there is an adoption process they must go through. DevOps can be mandated and they can be told about CALMS, etc. but nothing will change until they proceed through these phases. Some organizations can go faster and some will go slower. If you do not allow them to progress you will probably just get malicious compliance. If you are looking for a change then allow the following phases to develop naturally. Trust me, I've fought the battle and teams will not change unless they want to. Let them.

Phases of DevOps Adoption

It all starts with the decision to begin a DevOps transformation. When most companies begin implementing DevOps it boils down to creating a culture where development teams are accountable. They are accountable for building their projects, deploying them, and supporting them. This is difficult because, historically, they may not have been the case. They may have been part of a culture that created a ticket and requested files to be copied to a server. This may seem very old school, but trust me, there are many companies still performing software deploys this way. I'm sure yours is not one of them ;)

Automate the Manual

There are two (2) things that need to be automated. First, nothing else can proceed until you have a repeatable build process that is not located on the developers' machine. Next, you need the ability to consistently deploy the product to an initial environment or location. Scripts are preferable but documentation can suffice at the start.

The first goal is to get the build off the desktop. If the development team gives you a binary from their machine: STOP! At the very least you can script a simple build process and locate that on a server. Work with the team to document the build process and get it off the desktop! I cannot reiterate that enough.

Automating the build process is generally started by creating a build job in a build system. This step has traditionally been implemented in Jenkins, as it is available for free, and easily installed, but I have also used PowerShell and SSH to kick off the build. Remember, the goal is to get the build process off of the developers' machine. At this point, we are not concerned with pipelines. The only pipeline you should care about is building the project.

Now, some of you will be raising your eyebrows and questioning my trustworthiness for claiming development teams are building on a desktop and copying files to a server. The year is 2021 and containers rule the world. Kubernetes! Cloud! Trust me, they exist, and they are in your company. You just have not found them yet.

The next step is defining the deployment process. If the team does not have a document or artifact that describes the deployment process then I would guess they do not know the dependencies for their project. This has played out multiple times with statements like "the deployment process is easy ... just copy these files to this directory on the server." What about database credentials and configurations? Are there any local directories that need to exist for logging? Where does the files configuration go? Who has access to the passwords and how do they get changed when security rotates them for you?

Define the deployment process and make sure it includes dependencies. This part of the exercise can be done in Confluence or held in a Word document. It doesn't matter where but it needs to be done. You cannot automate anything unless you know what you are trying to automate. Anyone who tells you that their deployment process is simply copying files is lying.

Make it Better

When you begin the process of automation there may be mistrust for the implementation. You will need to answer questions like:

During this phase, the development team may be questioning the process but are generally pleased with the results. That is, they now have more time on their hands because the manual stuff, or at least a good portion of it, has been automated.

The questions above are real questions from real development teams. Please remember that a team cranking out business requests to a batch process that has worked for over 10+ years will question things. They will not have the level of comfort that you do with an automated process. The goal of this phase is to give that team the same level of comfort.

Making it better means using the various tools to provide insight into the processes you are automating. If you are creating a zip file with the binaries from a build we have done the following:

Remember, the team may be apprehensive about the automation being thrust upon them. From the simplest form of scripting the build and packaging process and placing the result on a file server to a full-blown Jenkins pipeline with the artifacts ending up in a binary repository. They may want it, like it, or trust it. It is different from what they have done, or have been doing, for years! You need to show them and demonstrate via the tooling that the process is better than the way they were doing it originally.

You will know this phase is over when the development teams begin to trust the build and deploy process. This will be apparent when they 1) don't talk or ask questions about it how it works anymore, and 2) they begin requesting features.

Optimize for DevOps

At this point, you have development team that is comfortable with the automation. The deployment process went from some level of documentation to, perhaps, a full deployment process in a vendor product. More than likely you will have a Jenkins server being pushed to its limits.

These are good things. Any automation, even the simplest, is better than a non-repeatable process being executed on some random developer's desktop. The worst way to find out about that build process is when they leave the company and things stop.

This phase goes on pretty much forever. There will be migrations from tool "A" to tool "B" coming along based upon the company's appetite for change and cost. Product versions and operating system updates will be installed. Most importantly, the development teams will be being requesting things along the lines of:

When there is trust in the system developed or utilized there is no telling how far or fast the teams can go. You must give a traditional, or legacy process-focused team time to adjust. I have never encountered a development team that questions automation after they have gone through these phases. For the record, starting in the first phase and proceeding through until the last, in my experience, takes two (2) years. Mind you this was without any management mandate and we modernized and automated thousands of projects across roughly two (2) dozen development teams.

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