I’ve said before that I’m a big believer that there’s no “one size fits all” solution for DevOps, and nothing in my experience as a DevOps Consultant has led me to change my mind on that one. Each organisation is subtly different enough to warrant their own approach to adopting, and then succeeding with DevOps.

However, I do think there are some good patterns for successful DevOps adoption. “The right ingredients” you might say. But as with cookery and chemistry experiments, it’s the quantity of, and order in which you introduce these ingredients that makes all the difference (I discovered this first-hand as a chemistry undergraduate J ).

Below is a list of 5 steps for starting out on a successful DevOps journey (“DevOps journey” = 100 cliché points btw). It’s not a solution for scaling DevOps – that’s step 6! But if you’re looking for somewhere to start, these 5 steps are essentially the blueprint I like to follow.

1. Agree what your goals are, what problems you’re trying to solve, and what DevOps means to you (is it just automation or is it a mindset?). You all need to be on the same page before you start, otherwise you’ll misunderstand each other, and without knowing your goals, you won’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing.
2. Build the platform. DevOps relies heavily on fast feedback loops, so you need to enable them before you go any further. This means putting in place the foundations of a highly automated Continuous Delivery platform – from requirements management though to branching strategy, CI, test automation and environment automation. Don’t try to create an enterprise-scale solution, just start small and do what you need to do to support 1 team, or this thing will never get off the ground. You’ll probably need to pull together a bunch of DevOps engineers to set this platform up – this is often how “DevOps teams” come about, but try to remember that this team should be a transitional phase, or at least vastly scaled down later on.
3. Assemble the team. We’re talking about a cross-functional delivery team here. This team will include all the skills to design, build, test, deliver and support the product, so we’re looking at a Product Owner, Business Analyst, Developers, Testers, and Infrastructure Engineers among others (it largely depends on your product – it may need to be extended to include UX designers, Security and so on).
4. Be agile, not waterfall. Waterfall’s just not going to work here I’m afraid. We’re going to need a framework that supports much faster feedback and encourages far greater collaboration at all times. So with that in mind, adopt a suitable agile framework like scrum or Kanban, but tailor it appropriately so that the “Ops” perspective isn’t left out. For example – your “definition of done” should stretch to include operability features. “Done” can no longer simply mean “passed UAT”, it now needs to mean “Deployable, monitorable and working in Pre-Live” at the very minimum. Another example: Your product backlog doesn’t just contain product functionality, it needs to include operability features too, such as scalability, maintainability, monitoring and alerting.
5. Work together to achieve great things. Let the delivery team form a strong identity, and empower them to take full ownership of the product. The team needs autonomy, mastery and purpose to fully unlock its potential.

Once you’ve achieved step 5, you’re well on your way to DevOps, but it doesn’t end there. You need to embrace a culture of continuous improvement and innovation, or things will begin to stagnate.

As I mentioned earlier, you still need to scale this out once you’ve got it working in one team, and that’s something that a lot of people struggle with. For some reason, there’s a huge temptation to try and get every team on-board at the same time, and make sure that they all evolve at the same rate. There’s no reason to do this, and it’s not the right approach.

If you have 20 teams all going through a brand new experience at the same time, there’s going to be a great deal of turmoil, and they’re probably going to make some of the same mistakes – which is totally unnecessary. Also, teams evolve and change at different rates, and what works for one team might not work for another, so there’s no use in treating them the same!

A much better solution is to start with one or two teams, learn from your experience, and move on to a couple more teams. The lessons learnt won’t always be transferrable from one team to the next, but the likelihood is that you’ll learn enough to give yourself a huge advantage when you start the next teams on their journey.

Sure, this approach takes time, but it’s more pragmatic and in my experience, successful.

One final comment on the steps above concerns step 2 – building the Continuous Delivery platform. It’s easy to get carried away with this step, but try to focus on building out a Minimum Viable Product here. There’s no getting away from the need for a high degree of automation, especially around testing. The types of testing you might need to focus on will depend on your product, its maturity, complexity and the amount of technical debt you’re carrying.

Other aspects you’ll need to cover in your Continuous Delivery MVP are deployment and environment automation (of course). Thankfully there are external resources available to give you a kick-start here if you don’t have sufficient skills in-house (there are plenty of contractors who specialise in DevOps engineering, not to mention dedicated DevOps consultancies such as DevOpsGuys J). Don’t spend months and months assessing different cloud providers or automation tools. Speak to someone with experience and get some advice, and crack on with it. Picking the wrong tool can be painful, but no more painful than deferring the decision indefinitely. Anyway, it’s relatively easy to move from Chef to Ansible, or from AWS to Azure (just examples) these days.

Many years ago I worked for a company that spent over a year assessing TFS, while continuing to use VS etc in the meantime. I worked with another company more recently who spent a year assessing various cloud providers, all the while struggling along with creaking infrastructure that ended up consuming everyone’s time. My point is simply that it’s better to make a start and then switch than it is to spend forever assessing your options. It’s even better to take some expert advice first.