Putting DevOps to Work in the Enterprise: 10 Tips for Success

by Chris Preimesberger

To be successful, your DevOps initiative needs to be aligned with your enterprise’s business needs. Make sure you can articulate how DevOps will make a difference to the business.

A successful DevOps initiative depends largely on company culture. Tools are an enabler, but tools alone do not make DevOps. Change is hard.

What does success look like? Is it more frequent releases? Higher-quality releases? Fewer failed deployments? Decide what the goals are and how you will measure them.

No other source of DevOps information articulates the business value of DevOps better than this book. Read this book and draw up your objectives and how you will measure them, and the buy-in from everybody will be easier.

A big-bang approach to cultural and tool changes doesn’t work. Build a “coalition of the willing” and demonstrate success.

Even though you start small, you want to ensure that you have visibility across multiple groups and projects. The more complex the system, the more important visibility is.

Make it easy for staff to test in production-like environments. Use self-service provisioning in Dev, so that Dev can test during the development process using these production-like environments.

Don’t rip and replace. Augment your existing tools with other solutions to provide control and visibility through your path to production.

Keep improving, then frequently review what is working and what isn’t. The DevOps space is evolving rapidly; make sure you do, too.

Don’t create a DevOps team that is isolated from other groups; the object is to rid the companies of silos of any kind.

Enjoy the benefits of collaboration and automation: less firefighting, fewer sleepless nights.