Introduction:
The big challenge for any tech business trying to scale up is how to raise sales without raising underlying costs. The obvious solution is to increase team efficiency. However, doing so without causing burnout, system failure, or high levels of technological debt isn’t easy.
This is where DevOps methods to work come into play. The crown jewel is a collaborative self-service solution to modern operations.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), on-demand self-service has long been considered an integral feature of cloud computing. However, it is one of the most challenging cloud-based capabilities to incorporate. This blog post examines that it should be a top priority.
DevOps and self-service on demand
The ecosystem of DevOps software is huge. The ‘periodic table of DevOps’ from Digital.ai (formerly XebiaLabs) features over 120 resources separated into 14 groups. Expecting each team to handle such difficulty on their own creates redundancy and waste. The challenge becomes much greater as you consider the increasing number of cloud provider providers (175+ for AWS and 600+ for Azure).
Curation is needed, which entails choosing a range of resources and making them available to distribution teams as self-service platforms.
This does not imply that a central team purchases a “Enterprise DevOps Platform” and then requires and enforces its use. Consumers (delivery teams) and suppliers must work together together to pick (curate) and create platforms (the platform teams). We’ll go into why Inner Source thinking is so important later!
From the perspective of the implementation team, this strategy has many advantages. – when they need to incorporate a key service or capability, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They don’t even have to give a proposal to a separate team. Instead, they should just take what they need, as they need it, and pay for it when they need it. Even better, core operational issues such as defence, governance, and compliance are all ‘built-in’ to the platform.
Is this to say that a DevOps online certificaton, Maybe not. DevOps is not a team management model, but rather a theory. It doesn’t always mean that growth and operations staff are on the same team.
The ability to speed app growth while maintaining the applications are reliable and resilient is critical to any engineering scale-progress. up’s
To do so, architects must understand operability, and operations engineers must make rapid innovation feasible. They could work together as a multidisciplinary team. They don’t have to, though. Platform-based applications should be delivered by a different operations unit using an overarching Platform as a Business system.
Consider the Site Reliability Engineering model developed by Google. Application SREs are in charge of managing the application, while Platform SREs are in charge of developing the shared tooling. They collaborate with the application delivery (product) departments in different teams.
Platform-based services have a number of advantages.
Quality and continuity
A platform-based approach brings a curated collection of collaborative toolchains into one place. This reduces the margin for error and improves the consistency of operability and protection across the organisation. Platforms make it easier to develop new features or frameworks and to maintain them in the long run.
Smaller groups
It’s simpler to reach the optimal team size of seven plus or minus two as joint self-service operations are provisioned separately. This increases team morale, whether team members are focusing on product delivery or the operations network. Smaller groups are also better for psychological wellbeing.
Fewer links to the past
Self-service operations remove the need for distribution teams to raise tickets or wait for their specifications. Eliminating attachments is essential to modern operating methods, as it allows for more autonomy, more development, and less waste.
Creating a self-service network that can be shared
Product delivery teams provide full access to enablement resources such as security and enforcement, as well as test automation and continuous delivery. A dedicated web team manages all of these key features, which are provisioned as code. This method of managing them guarantees greater continuity, cost containment, and governance.
This provides a means for scale-ups to improve product operability, resilience, and protection while rising production velocity. It would also reduce the chance of incurring new technological debt.
At the corporate level, performance quality are tracked and enhanced. As a result, distribution teams will concentrate on providing positive consumer service that encourages satisfaction and differentiates them from the competition. They will adapt and iterate goods with ease, trusting that the infrastructure is in good hands.
Reference systems may be used in self-service frameworks to assist with best practises.
Using self-service in combination with the Inner Root
It is possible to develop the self-service model even further as it is paired with an Inner Source approach. (For an introduction to Inner Source, see our latest blog How DevOps helps with technological debt.)
In a nutshell, this strategy helps platform services to develop over time in response to the needs of distribution teams.
The platform team develops the self-service platform and then makes the source code accessible via a code archive (repo). They are in charge of the repo’s overall upkeep from here, but everyone can contribute.
As a result, if a distribution team wants to expand something built by a platform team, they will do it themselves. The needed update is coded, and forwarded to the framework team as a pull request, much like with an open-source project. The update will be incorporated into the main codebase until it has been checked and accepted.
Conclusion: This is the gold standard for DevOps in several respects. Colleagues in development and management function together in a synergistic and constructive manner. All is aiming for the same thing: providing value-driven consumer services through dependable digital products that fulfil current needs. The end result is dynamic, swift, and stable creativity, giving your company a competitive advantage. A key enabler for any engineering scale-up is shared self-service operations. Are you ready to take your DevOps skills to the next stage of development?
