DevOps best practices are evolving rapidly, allowing organizations to build, test and deploy applications at a faster pace, and higher quality, than ever before. At the same time, honing the complex skills required to embrace DevOps on a wide scale is no easy feat in even the most forgiving environments, let alone the typical enterprise.
Join Alan Shimel as he interviews Aruna Ravichandran, co-author of the new book “DevOps for Digital Leaders”, about the cultural and technical strategies employed by today’s leading practitioners as they seek to “Reignite Business with a Modern DevOps-Enabled Software Factory”.
Learn more about:
The current state of play as today’s enterprise organizations expand use of agile and DevOps methodologies across their entire applications lifecycle.
Specific case studies highlighting those techniques that allow leading practitioners to further embrace and accelerate software delivery.
Emerging DevOps ROI metrics that have proven extremely useful in enabling organizations to measure and increase their overall success.
Regardless of where you stand in your DevOps transformation today, you’re bound to benefit greatly from this detailed analysis of real-world adoption and use cases. Register for the webcast, and download the book today.
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Chart a Winning Course: DevOps for Digital Leaders
1. Chart a Winning Course:
DevOps for Digital Leaders
Aruna Ravichandran
Author and DevOps Marketing Expert
Alan Shimel
Editor-in-Chief, DevOps.com
Jan. 17, 2017
Hello and welcome to today’s webcast, during which we’ll be discussing the new book “DevOps for Digital Leaders” along with some related topics and research.
We hope to make today’s program as interactive as possible, so we encourage you to enter any questions and comments that you might have into the system chat interface – we will get to as many of these as possible during the Q&A session at the end of today’s broadcast.
We’ll also conduct and discuss three different polling questions – so please participate in those as well.
And don’t forget we’ll also be contacting ten lucky attendees who will receive a free signed copy of the book.
Now, on to today’s program…
Joining us today is Aruna Ravichandran, the lead author of DevOps for Digital Leaders, who also serves as Vice President, DevOps Product and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies.
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While Aruna is very well known in DevOps circles today for her writing and work with CA, it’s worth noting that her perspective into this arena is also informed by years of work in programming – she at one point laid claim to writing over 1 million lines of code!
Aruna was assisted by two co-authors in writing “DevOps for Digital Leaders” – Kieran Taylor and Peter Waterhouse, who will be joining us for some of the Q&A today.
We’ll also point you here to where you can download a copy of the book or order your own print edition – with all proceeds from the print edition going to the Foundation for Excellence - providing STEM scholarships to children in India.
You can also find this info on DevOps.com or CA.com – so if you haven’t already, get your copy of the book today.
So, why did we write this book, based on what we see and hear today on the market?
Everybody knows that DevOps is gaining widespread adoption – but there is still a long way to go in terms of maturity.
According to a newly released report from Coleman Parkes and CA, which we’ll also talk more about later in today’s program – you can see here that only a third of all DevOps adopters have move to embrace the practice broadly.
So, we’ve arrived at a point where DevOps is taking off, yet there’s still a long way to go, which means that practitioners are looking for more guidance in terms of what is working and what is not, based on the experience of those people who have already done the work.
That’s why we focused so much of the book on real-world use cases, three of which we’ll discuss in greater detail later on in the program.
You’ll also see the link here to download the report : Accelerating Velocity & Customer Value with Agile & DevOps – this piece illustrates, like the book, the desire for more proven and broadly applicable metrics. DevOps is such a complex set of criteria and processes that it is critical to understand how we can begin to track and measure related change – to refine and improve related process over time.
In general, based on what we all see and hear out there - clearly there’s a need for more information, and this book hope to fill the gaps – or more specifically advance the conversation in terms of providing specific details about what it takes to continue to advance your own DevOps initiatives.
It’s also extremely useful to understand where everyone on this webcast stands today, so we’ll be conducting a series of live polls to gather that information and share it with you all…
The first of those polls looks at where people stand today in terms of DevOps adoption and maturity…
At this point we’d like to gauge the audience in terms of DevOps maturity – obviously this is a subjective concept, but give us your best guess!
POLLING QUESTION: What is your organization’s current level of DevOps maturity:
-Not yet started
-Early adopter
-Growing maturity
-Advanced practitioner
Discuss results and DevOps maturity trends, including:
How do poll results compare to what we see on the larger market?
What is the real state of DevOps maturity and adoption
What does that tell us about the kind of expertise that people really need to move the needle, today
How do we expect this maturity to change in the immediate future?
Before we jump into specific use cases, let’s talk about the best practices that we cover in the book at a relatively high level.
Culture remains king: This is nothing new, but it always bears repeating and it was a hallmark in everyone that we spoke to, and all the involved use cases.
There has been a lot written and said about how culture has to change, why there needs to be strong executive leadership, and what the benefits of that may be – in the book and in the following use cases, I think you start to see how this is all playing out in the real-world.
Lean feeds DevOps: There’s no doing DevOps without getting lean, so considerable attention must be given to adopting lean practices to get DevOps off the ground.
Again, we’ll see some more proof of this when we discuss the use cases, and in particular the results from our recent work with Coleman Parkes. The key here is how you dovetail agile and DevOps practices to attack bottlenecks and refine process as you go, and it is an iterative process where things become “leaner” over time.
Measure everything: Well maybe not everything, but metrics and data-driven methodology lie at the heart of the entire DevOps movement.
Everyone that we talk to says the same thing: you can’t understand where you are and where you need to get to, or what’s changing, without the right metrics. But merely understanding the need for metrics isn’t enough. We talk a lot about what metrics are proving useful, and how those continue to inform change moving forward.
It’s all about the customer: Everything that we do in DevOps has to impact the customer in a positive manner, period.
Even when you are talking about deep internal SDLC processes the ultimate focus of everything that you do has to be where it improves user experience and benefits the customer, and this includes culture. At the end of the day, improving the organization is the best way to improve customer experience.
Again, none of these are revelations, and we’ll go to much greater lengths to provide explicit examples – the book certainly does – but these are the core tenets of everything we wrote about.
Hopefully when you read the book it will show you how to address all of these issues in a way that allows you to move faster and appreciate greater success.
To help speed innovation and constantly update applications to improve customer experience, more organizations than ever have adopted the practice of Continuous Delivery – specifically the ability to rapidly and reliably release software across the pipeline at any time.
Related to this use case:
150-year old global bank and financial services provider ING sought to improve its overall business agility by delivery newer, higher quality applications to its customers are a faster pace.
In seeking to adapt its 15,000-strong global IT workforce and existing infrastructure to this new set pf practices, ING faced a wide set of related challenges, including:
Elimination of onerous, time-consuming waterfall practices and accelerate the pace of applications innovation
Restructuring internal culture to leverage agile “scrum” teams that brought together development and operations expertise
Preventing the continued introduction of performance-impacting issues into the production environment
Relieve software deployment hurdles uncured by integration and release platforms
Reframe application roadmap planning away from a focus on technical barriers
To help alleviate these problems, the bank restructured its internal culture and process around continues delivery and also leveraged significant automation to address SDLC requirements specific to integration and release.
Among the specific goals of this approach were changes including:
Bridging the gap between dev and ops to bring all stakeholder to the table to have a shared approach across the SDLC
Feeding information from the testing process back into development to eliminate emerging code defects
Increasing its pace of underlying mobile applications code deployments to speed innovation
Speeding the release of new applications capabilities to end users
Transitioning from release cycles to focus on strategic business objectives.
By leveraging DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices, ING was able to dramatically improve its overall business velocity and software innovation capabilities – increasing the
pace of its applications releases from an average of once every 13 weeks to weekly updates.
Further, ING was also able to improve its pace of underlying mobile applications code deployments from several hundred per month to over 80,000 per month, in less than two years.
Ultimately, ING customers expressed their approval both in adoption and via public forums, as ING’s mobile application reviews on the Apple iTunes App Store climbed from one star to over four stars.
Based on this transformation, ING executives credit adoption of DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices for increasing everything from SDLC efficiency and related employee satisfaction, to greatly improved shareholder value.
To keep pace with demands for new features and application updates, digital transformation must be driven by Continuous Delivery – specifically the ability to address the historically onerous and time-consuming process of software release.
Related to this use case:
Citrix provides a range of virtualization, networking, and cloud solutions to around 400,000 customers worldwide.
To help advance practices for both for its customers and internal users, Citrix is continually looking at ways to improve its business operations and enable innovation.
Among the typical challenges that the company faced in undertaking the effort were those related to both development and operations.
Development-related challenges included:
• Manual, time-consuming, error-prone environment provisioning and release processes
• Numerous errors happening throughout the application release cycle, creating lengthy mitigation
• Inefficiencies caused by the uncoordinated adoption of open source tools, leading to duplication of effort, redundant solutions, and disjointed integration
• Slow response to customer feedback and market
Related to operations, challenges included:
Fractured release processes; managing with spreadsheets, scripts, and tools
• Difficulty managing/tracking the volume of releases as more agile development ensues
• Long weekends, low staff-morale and stress due to problems when finally deploying to production
Double-digit application outages or downtime happening each month, requiring an “all hands on deck” approach to resolution
• Loss of customers and revenue due to downtime/outages or errors in application deployments
To help address these issues, Citrix created an Office of IT Delivery Optimization, tasked with evaluating and improving all aspects of IT.
Among the goals of this initiative in creating a more efficient, shared approach to applications delivery were:
Identifying common bottleneck across deployment and delivery
Streamlining processes from development through to production
Establishing common business goals and metrics
Reducing manual efforts during deployment
Moving to advance automation
DevOps was leveraged as a significant element of this plan to help achieve better cross-team collaboration, faster delivery, and greater quality –
specifically evolving and automating key software release processes.
After smaller compartmentalized adoption of DevOps and these techniques, Citrix wanted to take a more widespread, centralized approach to maximize results and share best practices.
During proof of concept, Citrix moved from manual release processes to fully automated release processes, reducing deployment time by 80 percent.
Spurred on by this amazing result, teams re-architected the company’s flagship “MyCitrix” application into many smaller pieces, which, along with automating aspects of release automation, enabled the application deployment time to be reduced by up to 94 percent.
In general, Citrix has been able to significantly accelerate its application delivery and reduce the errors and time required during the release process, enabling the company to be more responsive to customer needs, ensure compliance and auditability, and focus on innovation instead of repetitive tasks.
Executives now tout how this approach has helped accelerate the adoption of DevOps principles across the business and inspired increased innovation.
To ensure that applications are functioning at optimal levels, and help drive critical performance back across the SDLC to increase innovation and improve quality, more and more organizations are adopting a “shift left” approach to applications monitoring and management.
Related to this use case:
ANZ Bank is a leading commercial and personal banking and financial services institution headquartered in Australia and beyond.
To help improve the performance of its applications, and increase the efficiency of its SDLC, with the goal of achieving 100% availability and uptime, ANZ moved to extend application performance management (APM) program across the entire IT infrastructure, including four data centers, mainframes, and more than 10,000 servers.
Among the typical challenges that the company faced in undertaking the effort were
Addressing the massive complexity created by distributed systems and monitoring capabilities
A lack of continuous visibility into applications performance and outages
The inability to understand transaction flows within the context of the application itself to ID root cause issues
Limited ability to identify performance issues during testing – before the manifested in production and hit end users
Massive issues introduced into the SDLC any time new applications releases were introduced
To help address these issues, ANZ sought to expanding application monitoring beyond infrastructure alone to be able to find and fix issues faster.
Among the goals of this initiative in creating a more efficient, shared approach to applications delivery were:
Reducing the number of incidents caused by application releases
Maintain continuous visibility into application performance
Perform deep dives into the application layers to obtain code-level visibility
Measure and analyze transactions as they moved across the distributed and highly diverse ANZ Bank infrastructure
Identifying performance issues during the testing phase, prior to feeding over to production
Feed critical performance data back across the SDLC to enable more efficient development and delivery
By leveraging DevOps processes and adopting this “shift left” approach to monitoring and sharing of related data, ANZ has appreciated huge benefits in both improving customer experience and adapting its software factory to be more efficient.
Along with massively reducing customer downtime, ANZ is now able to proactively discover and address issues before they affect services, preventing at least 10 severe user impacting outages in the first six weeks after each release.
By looking at transactions flowing through an application, and identifying the business user behavior attached to those transactions, outages are being corrected more quickly, with applications rapidly redesigned so outages don’t repeat themselves.
Following on from this success, ANZ has extended its shift-left approach to more than 20 applications, reducing the amount of time spent on software issues by over 60% and increasing confidence in application development and deployment.
At this point we’d like to know if these are DevOps Use Cases that resonate with your own experiences –or, if you’re focused on something else, please tell us what that might be!
POLLING QUESTION: Which of these use case scenarios best illustrates your story?
-Use case 1: CD and continuous testing
-Use case 2: Automating software release
-Use case 3: Shift left monitoring
-Other: If other, please tell us where your current DevOps focus lies
Discuss results and DevOps use case trends, including:
What are the strengths and challenges of these particular paradigms?
Why are these particular areas gaining so much traction?
What do the use cases and replies tell us about overall maturity?
What comes next in terms of prioritization?
Let’s talk a little bit more about this new research, released only last week, which further highlights a lot of the points that we cover in the book.
Again, the report is “Accelerating Velocity & Customer Value with Agile & DevOps” and was conducted by Coleman Parkes, and sponsored by CA Technologies, and you can find a link to the report here at the bottom of your screen.
In general, the report, based on a survey of 1,770 senior business and IT executives, finds that:
The pressures of the app economy mean that improving velocity and delivering optimal customer value must live at the heart of every organization’s digital transformation strategy. As a result, businesses are transforming the way in which they design, develop, and deliver applications so they can offer higher quality apps to customers, faster than ever before.
Unsurprisingly, this analysis revealed that:
-81% believe DevOps and Agile are critical to digital transformation
It’s of course Companies are seeing strong results in using agile development by itself …
Survey showed that using agile led to:
-A 36% improvement in time-to-decision (the time to act on new opportunities)
-A 27% improvement in speed-to-market (the time to develop, test, and release new apps)
Small wonder that 88% of the respondents to the survey have implemented agile in their organizations
DevOps, also by itself, speeds and improves the software delivery process.
Survey showed that DevOps led
-37% improvement in speed-to-market (the time to develop, test, and release new apps).
-41% improvement in quality ( # of defects)
As a result it’s no surprise that 87% of respondents have implemented DevOps
One of the most interesting and meaningful areas of research that was produced were a set of responses related to the value of leveraging agile and DevOps practices in concert.
Obviously, agile and DevOps, have become critical to success.
Combined, the two practices help businesses respond to changing market dynamics with speed and confidence; and get to market faster with high-quality products that customers want.
Related to the specific results, when agile and DevOps are practiced together, the benefits are event better.
The Coleman Parkes research found that among advanced adopters of both paradigms, respondents found:
41% improvement in operational efficiency
63% increase in new business growth
29% improvement in customer satisfaction/NPS
In addition:
Nearly ¾ of survey respondents who use agile and DevOps together report improvement in employee recruitment and retention. That's a 30 percent increase compared to companies that only practice agile.
While 58 percent of agile-only users reported an increase in customer experience, those that paired agile and DevOps experienced a 78 percent increase in customer experience.
The 63% difference between improvements in new business growth is particularly illuminating, as it illustrates the huge commercial
opportunities agile and DevOps offer in the digital era.
There are also major cost efficiencies to be gained from combining agile and DevOps. Users of both
practices are achieving 65% greater reductions in IT costs than those that only use agile.
Another area that the report highlights which we also covered closely in the book was the notion of DevOps metrics and measurements.
We talk about some great numbers on metrics and ROI in the book, a lot of these came out of the 2016 State of DevOps Report which CA also sponsored, along with IT Revolution and others.
Specific examples include advanced DevOps adopters deploying code 200 times more frequently than low performers, driving 2,555 times faster lead times, 24 times faster recovery times and producing three times lower change failure rates.
However, in the new report we get a better idea of the specific metrics that organizations are using internally to track success, including:
Business growth
Operational efficiency
Employee productivity
Customer satisfaction
Customer experience
It’s amazing to see that so many of these, over half – relate directly to external issues such as time to market and customer satisfaction.
We also see that the benefits are showing up across the board as well
At this point we’ll ask our final polling question – we’d like to know which of these DevOps metrics you’re using or most interested in, and please feel free to check all that apply on this one, or fill in any others.
POLLING QUESTION: Which of these metrics are you using today to measure DevOps impact? [Select all that apply]
-Business growth
-Operational efficiency
-Employee productivity
-Customer satisfaction
-Customer experience
Also please feel free to enter into the chat window any other metrics are you using to measure the impact of DevOps, we’d love to hear about those.
Discuss results and DevOps maturity trends, including:
What these metrics really tell us about where people stand today?
What are the actions that can be taken as a result of these metrics?
How can metrics be used to advance specific processes?
Why it’s so important to continue to evolve metrics over time?
So what does this tell us about where we stand with metrics and ROI today – more specifically what did we find among the practitioners and use cases detailed in the book?
A lot of this goes back to culture, whether that’s internal or in dealing with customers.
You have to maintain a balance – measurements must highlight advancement across the entire spectrum – touting acceleration of development without understanding it’s impact on operations, or on the flip side not feeding info about MTTR into development, defeats the purpose. You have to look at the big picture impact.
Change is everywhere – As agile and DevOps are seeking to enact such transformational change across the entire ADLC, you want to keep an eye on where things are changing most dramatically, and rapidly. You need to understand how and where change is occurring to keep everyone on the same page.
Quality is the ultimate arbiter – going faster and creating more problems makes no sense. Creating faster stove pipes makes no sense. Everything you measure must include some aspect of quality, whether that’s volume of software releases or cultural impact. Quality counts, especially in gauging the ultimate impact on customers.
Customers, customer, customers – if you look at every useful best practice, use case or metric, it all comes back to the customer. That’s what this is really all about. Everything that you do, whether it is speeding apps development, or monitoring apps behavior, has to track back to improving customer experience.
Culture – consider both the State of DevOps Report and the Coleman Parkes research, one of the leading metrics we see being touted is improvement in employee satisfaction. Happy works make better products that lead to happier customers. The halo affect here can’t be understated, from employee retention to people’s eagerness to innovate.
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In general, in talking to real-world practitioners we found that, as with larger DevOps adoption, it’s best to pinpoint initial metrics on smaller gains and then scale those measurements over time, in parallel with broader DevOps adoption and growing maturity.
By measuring the success of specific projects—or products developed using DevOps processes, you gain the baseline for subsequent assessment – to help understand what is changing and where that is truly impacting the business and customers.
This is where calculations such as software deployment rates and so-called mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) come in handy.
They give you a practical sense of where the change is happening and what it’s overall impact may be, related to everything from delivery of new capabilities to quality of emerging processes to worker satisfaction [people that are involved in delivery of superior functionality that pleases customers are of course going to feel better about that work].
On the most basic level, saving any amount of time previously spent building, deploying, and maintaining applications means decreased time to market and more opportunities to capture revenue from customers, all while improving internal culture.
Using such these types of frameworks, you can begin to tie delivery of mission-critical, or even revenue-impacting functionality to applications lifecycle improvements
And create the context necessary to understand the overall impact of DevOps, across the board.
Let’s take as many questions as we can in the time remaining…
…joining us for this segment are co-authors Kieran Taylor and Peter Waterhouse.
Thanks again for joining us today and be sure to get the book.
Don’t forget that all proceeds from the print edition going to the Foundation for Excellence - providing STEM scholarships to children in India and…
…if you’re one of the ten lucky attendees who has won a free signed copy of the book you will hear from us via email shortly.
