What is Enterprise DevOps
To me, Enterprise DevOps is more a culture change than an automation project. Enterprise DevOps is an oxymoron because DevOps is about having small ‘Two Pizza” teams that work independently, quickly and free from corporate processes. Whereas, an Enterprise IT shop is a place of large teams, held back by red tape and the political landscape. Beyond that, Enterprise DevOps is looking to set patterns and build pipelines for the many, which undoubted led to less flexibility each team have to innovate.
To make matter worse, with culture change comes politics, and more politics.
In the beginning we need to find who really wants to change and weed out who just wants to check off the box next to DevOps. This is especially true when dealing with moving to new tools/platforms, upper management will have people attached to current tools they helped bring many moons ago. Or worse, consolidation of tool-sets, teams will
have their tools they cannot live without even if there if a similar or better option is available. These political under pinnings also push the bounds for DevOps in some case, I’ve seen teams start to compromise on some key DevOps practices just to hit dates of said DevOps capabilities.
Another key piece to the Enterprise DevOps puzzle is that the team can produce reports/metric. Without, reports and metrics showing the gains DevOps practices can bring, can be hard to prove. This can lead teams to choose options/tools that have built-in metrics even though they may not be best choice them as a team. Or more likely, the Enterprise DevOps teams has cookie cutter metrics for them if the follow a process that is not highly tuned for their team. These options usual lead to less than great DevOps out comes, team compromise their potential to conform for sake of metrics.
Moreover, Enterprise DevOps cannot be top-down or bottom-up; there has to be a meeting in the middle. Without both upper management willingness to spend and teams wanting to improve, it is very hard to move an entire corporate culture; and moving/changing a culture is exactly what needs to happen.
Lastly and most likely the one of the larger factor I’ve seen in Enterprise DevOps is that leaders talk about ‘failing fast’ and learning but when a team fails and are ready to pivot is becomes a political song and dance. This dance can play out in many ways and it usually is a painful process for all involved. This leads to further push the old train of thought that failing is painful and should avoided, when the exact opposite is what needs to happen in my opinion.
To keep this short (I could write a ton more), Enterprise DevOps is in fact an oxymoron that has many potential avenues to go, as such it is very hard to “do” DevOps at Enterprise scale. But it can be done it just takes a lot of will and elbow grease; I think, well I hope. More to come.