5 Stages of DevOps Practice- Ultimate Guide

Key takeaways

The most significant way to accelerate application delivery and product iteration under the DevOps model is by combining development and operations teams.
- Applications should be re-architected if there’s a business requirement or any software necessity.
Well, that’s not limited; after knowing these five key phases of DevOps maturity, you can now ace seven different facets of your business: automation, organization, delivery, security, monitoring, testing, and operations.

The most significant way to accelerate application delivery and product iteration under the DevOps model is by combining development and operations teams. But it’s not as simple as it sounds; it’s a tough road to travel. You must know that sometimes DevOps success often requires breaking down operational and cultural barriers before any work begins.

However, working with DevOps can get simple if a company becomes capable of figuring out the best way to navigate its DevOps journey, and when things go as per the roadmap, the impact can be significant. This roadmap is also referred to as different stages, which is a systematic process of discovery, evolution, and automation that makes the DevOps process seamless.

What is DevOps? #

DevOps is an evolving and one of the most advanced frameworks encouraging faster, better application development. It also helps to deliver new or revised software features or products to customers faster.

The stages of practice in DevOps are for encouraging smoother, continuous communication, visibility, collaboration, integration, and transparency between their IT operations team (Ops) and application development teams (Dev) counterparts.

DevOps Stages help teams rapidly test and deploy new technologies as the same testing and deployment patterns are reused. According to DevOps experts, by creating a configuration management tool, teams will work together and adapt to managed DevOps services and culture.

Stages of DevOps Practice #

The Technology Stack Normalization #

Normalization of the technology stack is the first stage of the process. Here teams will start adopting the true Agile methods and also implement the proper version control to provide seamless continuous delivery and integration. This is also the stage where all the redundant technologies with no use throughout the journey are eliminated to make the stack normalized.

This stage is not only the initial stage but also the most crucial one, and to be successful here, practitioners must work on building a standard set of technologies and, after successful completion, put application configurations in version control.

Reduce and Standardize Variability #

In DevOps, both operation and development teams work for one common goal: Reducing variance. Working together for one goal helps both teams to ensure that process complexity is reduced, the teach is further consolidated to a single OS or OS family, and, most importantly, early collaboration opportunities are explored.

This stage is also crucial for two major reasons-

The system configurations should be placed in version control.
Applications should be re-architected if there’s a business requirement or any software necessity.

Scaling DevOps practices #

Scaling DevOps practices to other departments and teams is needed after you have the basics in place from stages 1 and 2.

This is crucial because when there’s a growth in communication and collaboration, the main focus of managed DevOps services automatically shifts towards improving application delivery and other service management. It’s true that when the IT department adopts DevOps practices, all other departments directly or indirectly linked to it will also start adopting DevOps.

Moreover, scaling DevOps practices will eventually push more knowledge within the organization that further will help accelerate the overall improvement of the DevOps culture inside.

Automation #

Almost every organization gets stuck to this with one common state of confusion. This is: When to use the automation phase?

The automation phase should come later in the DevOps journey for a seamless flow of application delivery and iterations. This is because the first three phases are essential for the organization to begin automation. Moreover, automating the infrastructure in the fourth phase is easy once things are set right.

The automation phase enables different self-service thinking in the departments and makes DevOps capable of adapting faster in the organization.

Provide Self-service Capabilities #

This is the last phase in the DevOps journey. At the end of Phase 4, you can assume that the departments are completely aligned with different DevOps practices. This is why the organization treats IT as a profit center that eventually supports the entire process.

In this phase, the service delivery and incident management become an automated process and also, and the resources are provided to each department. Self-service turns into a culture that ultimately aims to enhance the overall DevOps adaptability for human resources and newer departments.

Benefits of DevOps Stages #

With managed DevOps services and proponents, there are many different business and technical benefits. DevOps culture with required stages can also result in happier customers and teams. Some benefits of DevOps include

Greater scalability and availability
Greater visibility into system outcomes
More stable operating environments
Faster, better product delivery
Faster issue resolution and reduced complexity
Better resource utilization
Greater automation
Greater innovation

Final Words #

DevOps culture is the most advanced and effective way of software delivery as it brings both Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) in one frame. Well, that’s not limited; after knowing these five key phases of DevOps maturity, you can now ace seven different facets of your business: automation, organization, delivery, security, monitoring, testing, and operations.

So, step up your DevOps journey with these five key stages.

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