An unpretentious newsletter that started as a personal learning and getting-in-touch project by Ivan Krnic grew into a popular sociotechnical newsletter covering topics of technical excellence, organizational improvements, and productivity.
2020 State of DevOps Report
Working in the field of organizational change and leadership, it’s helpful to periodically lift your head and see what other organizations are doing, what’s working for them, and what’s not. Sure, there are conferences and meetups and books and podcasts where you can hear this, but it is nice to have all these insights condensed into one document. That’s what the State of DevOps brings to the table. A fresh, independent take on where we as an industry are and trends that are emerging.
This year, the report reveals two key insights: the first one is the concept of internal platforms and platform teams, and the second one is the change management process in the organization.
As the number of teams in an organization grows, it becomes increasingly inefficient for each team to solve the same technical problems and maintain its own technology stack, toolchain, and processes. The lack of standardization causes governance problems and takes valuable time that could otherwise be spent on delivering value to the customers. Having an internal platform can significantly reduce the toil and overhead of individual product teams. An internal platform doesn’t necessarily assume building a technical solution from scratch. Well-composed documentation explaining how to combine and use existing off-the-shelf products can also do the trick. The “Thinnest Viable Platform” is what we’re aiming at.
Internal platforms are designed, built and maintained by platform teams. What are platform teams and how do they enable the rapid flow of change, read in our article Conquering the cognitive load with the platform team.
The change management process is another thing that differentiates efficient organizations from mediocre ones. Efficient organizations focus on the rapid flow of change. Therefore, they use lightweight processes that push decision-making closer to the action, increase autonomy in teams, and avoid change approval boards that introduce bottlenecks. Best organizations rely heavily on test and deployment automation through deployment pipelines. Another useful pattern is “Changes as code” where every change in the system is implemented as a change in the code (application, configuration, you name it…). As opposed to free-style descriptions and instructions written in Word documents or wikis, code (hence changes!) can be versioned in a source control system and subjected to various automated validations (auditors will love you!). Additionally, changes as code can be rolled forward to the last stable implementation in case something goes awry.
The report predicts the future of DevOps in spreading through the organization and breaking organizational silos such Sec, Biz, HR, Fin…
We hope so too.
Interview of the Month
Alanna Brown on State of DevOps
Alanna Brown is Sr. Director Marketing at Puppet and a person standing behind the State of DevOps report from the very beginning. I talked with Alanna about key insights from the latest 2020 State of DevOps but we also touched upon the past and how the report came to life, a story that few people are familiar with – take a look at our conversation here.
If you made it this far, why don’t you book casual private time with our 0800-DEVOPS team to discuss 2020 State of DevOps Report or any other DevOps related topic -> NO strings attached! You just click’n’pick a timeslot that best suits you and we’ll do the rest….let’s figure out how we can help you. Or just have a casual chat on interesting topics!
Hand picked
All the talks from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2020 (both Las Vegas and London) are out and public! A free membership will get you access to up to 10 views every 28 days. If you’re a binge-watcher, fear not, you can purchase an unlimited license.
We have a lot of talks today. All Day DevOps 2020, the world’s largest DevOps conference took place in November. It’s the most unusual conference running talks by 180 speakers for full 24 hours. And there is a talk for everyone: from cultural transformation to SLOs and service meshes. Here is their on-demand channel.
Imagine your company celebrating great success in hitting the best financial result ever. What is the one move and who is the one person responsible for this success? Impossible to say, right? Then what makes us think that we can similarly find one single root cause when something goes wrong? Casey Rosenthal explains nicely the problem with traditional Root Cause Analysis.
Few things shook the cloud-native world as the announcement of Kubernetes deprecating Docker as a container runtime after v1.20. Although it sounds apocalyptical, it isn’t and for most people nothing will change… “Docker-produced images will continue to work in your cluster with all runtimes, as they always have.” Read all about it here.
IBM and Red Hat kicked-off a video series called “Show me!”. You’ll find a lot of interesting things here, including OpenShift on the mainframe and Power systems, how Ansible can be used with IBM Systems, and much more.
Read with us
Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
Running continuously since 2012, State of DevOps reports have gathered a lot of data and generated numerous insights on how elite organizations produce value.
Accelerate summarizes these insights and provides a roadmap for achieving greatness in software delivery. If you’re lost and don’t know where to start in fixing your organization and delivery process, this is THE place to start.
