soon as possible, even though that could mean
changes to your processes, skill mix, or automated
tooling. This is new for most people who leverage
DevOps approaches, and a long shakedown cruise is
the only way to fix issues before you go live.
Step 9: Define Monitoring and Metrics
Look at productivity metrics and track overall perfor-
mance with a focus on the value that’s being delivered
to the business. Make sure to track business agility
and time-to-market in terms of value delivered. You’ll
find that if a DevOps process can compress the time it
takes to release changes to a critical application from
one month to one week, the value is often 30 times
that of the DevOps investment.
“Most envision layoffs as part of a
reorganization around DevOps, but
it’s primarily a matter of retraining.”
errors that are occurring, and how well the system is
meeting operational expectations. Using this data,
you can add continuous improvement to the list of
things that DevOps provides.
Step 10: Continuously Improve
Finally, make sure you continuously improve your
DevOps processes and automation tools. Work with a
team of DevOps leaders and practitioners to con-
stantly second-guess DevOps, always keeping an eye
out for potential improvement areas.
DevOps in the cloud means improving operations by
having an open and honest culture that craves change
for the better and always looks at ways to provide
faster time-to-production and better quality applica-
tions. This interactive approach to improvement is
something traditional IT doesn’t practice yet, but it’s
necessary if DevOps is to work effectively. Today,
that’s an imperative.
By doing this, you’re not trying to justify the existence
of DevOps, although that’s part of it. You’re looking to
understand where you’re performing well—and not so
well. By using metrics and analysis, you can determine
code quality, integration issues, the number of testing
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