How to get started on DevOps Mode

For a lot of us, the starting point on moving into a DevOps transformation is vague and many struggle to nail down the first step. Cloud migrations are often the beginning of moving into DevOps working mode. And believe it or not, you can implement the cloud and still run it the good old waterfall way.

What if I told you, that you can start on your DevOps journey without the cloud and without major investments? DevOps remains a philosophy, rather than a toolset or a list of applications. We understand, that a good checklist and a number of tools help you navigate your journey to DevOps mode and we are sharing a lot of this in our book All Hands on Tech.

For now, I had the feeling that there must be something more approachable

For me, the biggest game changer in moving towards DevOps Mode is touching your attitude towards Releases. In order to move your organization naturally into the adoption of DevOps principles you can move the needle with two simple things: Reduce your Release Sizes, and increase your Release Frequency.

In other words: instead of delivering 10 features in 3 months, you deliver 5 features in 6 weeks, and in a next step, 2 features in 2 weeks etc. This process will take time and needs to be taken step by step.

By increasing the frequency, overhead topics will need to be addressed e.g. releases usually take a long time to be deployed. Maybe this can be automated by your teams. Your team might encounter that security checks need to be done over and over again. You start investigating how to automate security tasks and how to increase security features of their delivery and so forth.

Some of your people might raise these issues before even getting started - e.g. how should we increase the frequency of releases if I only have one deployment slot per quarter in our local datacenter. If you are having this discussion, you are already on a good way to change things around ;)

As a little reminder here is one of recent LinkedIn Posts:

Until then,

Sophie