After describing these critical strategies that support Disciplined DevOps, we’d like to conclude with what we feel to be critical success factors:
- Build a collaborative and respectful culture across your entire IT organization. Our experience is that people, and the way that they work together, are the primary determinants of success when it comes to adopting a Disciplined DevOps strategy. Unfortunately, it is considerably more difficult to bring about cultural change in an organization than it is to adopt a handful of new practices.
- Focus on people, but don’t forget process and tooling. DevOps is primarily a mindset, but as you’ve seen in this article there is a large number of potential practices/strategies (yes, that process stuff) that you need to consider adopting. In turn these practices/strategies are supported by tooling, either existing tooling that you have in place (albeit now used in a different manner) or new tooling that you will need to adopt.
- Choice is good. This article has made it clear that there are many options available to you, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. No single approach is perfect, and no single approach works in all situations. You not only need to have choices, it’s incredibly good to have choices. Remember the principle Choice is Good!