11 Black Holes of DevOps: Don’t Get Lost in Space

As you scale to create an enterprise DevOps process that works effectively across hundreds of applications and thousands of people, you’ll inevitably discover that things don’t work the same way they did back on the developer’s laptop with a single team, or a single environment…

Is your organization kicking off its DevOps transformation? Aiming for wild success? No doubt you’re headed for all sorts of adventures! If you’re like many organizations, you’re setting off on the first full-blown leg of your DevOps journey and your crew’s excitement is palpable. You’ve had a successful DevOps pilot with a team or two, and now it’s time to reach for the stars. Now you’re going to implement DevOps across your enterprise… and if you’re like many intrepid explorers who have gone before you, you have to plan for hundreds or even thousands of people, hundreds or thousands of applications, and thousands of deployments per month. And like those previous pioneers, you’ve probably written a lot of scripts to make your pilot projects work—scripts that create infrastructure, scripts that manage deployments, maybe even scripts that try to orchestrate release pipelines or string together your DevOps toolchain. But as you stretch to implement DevOps at enterprise scale, scripting DevOps can start to consume your teams completely, sucking them into black holes of perpetual maintenance and unmanageability, never to be seen or heard from again. Or at least never to reach the efficiency and productivity your business demands. As you embark on your enterprise DevOps journey, you’ll find you have many new complexities to consider. Here are 11 core DevOps requirements that turn into black holes when you try to write scripts to meet these needs:

1. Deployment plans that can span multiple stages and environments
2. Release orchestration and dependency management that can handle complex application architectures
3. Software delivery pipelines that support advanced release and deployment patterns
4. Intelligent, automated rollback from failures
5. Standardized processes that scale DevOps across your organization
6. Visibility into your team’s real-world release processes, covering both manual and automated tasks
7. Collaboration with stakeholders who aren’t script-savvy
8. Reports that reflect the end-to-end release pipeline
9. Proactive assessment and mitigation of release risks
10. Automatic collection of compliance data as a built-in part of the release process
11. Governance to enforce separation of duties and enterprise access control

As you’ll discover on your journey, DevOps processes that are simple for one project and one team grow drastically in complexity as you scale them across the organization, seek to meet compliance requirements, and make plans for continuous improvement. Scripting release and deployment instructions may work at small scale, but scripts become prohibitively expensive to create and nearly impossible to maintain as your DevOps initiative grows. If any of these “black hole” requirements are core parts of your DevOps “spacescape,” don’t fall into the trap of scripting them as you scale… or you’ll watch helplessly as your precious resources get sucked into the void!Want the full details on these 11 black holes and how you can vector around them? This new white paper explains it all!

For further exploration:

• Continuous Scripting vs. Scalable DevOps
• The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform
• How Model-based Deployment Accelerates Software Delivery
• 10 Reasons You Can’t Scale DevOps with Configuration Management Tools
• How to Create an Integrated Software Delivery Pipeline Using the XebiaLabs DevOps Platform