Q&A with Cycloid on what companies should keep in mind regarding DevOps
DevOps continues to be the top desired operating model for IT businesses, and yet, for the 4th year in a row, 80% of companies are still struggling to adopt DevOps in their day-to-day practice. Moreover, the DevOps talent gap continues to grow – 40% of companies cite talent shortage as the main business challenge.
Why is DevOps still so hard to achieve? What trick are companies missing? Spoiler alert – it’s about the people.
SourceForge recently sat down with Benjamin Brial, founder of Cycloid, a DevOps and Hybrid Cloud platform designed to bridge gaps between IT teams and democratize DevOps and hybrid cloud adoption. In this Q&A, Benjamin shares his thoughts on the real business value of DevOps and one crucial detail that companies miss about their DevOps strategy.
Founder of Cycloid
Straight to the point: what is the ultimate business value of DevOps?
It’s simple – it helps people work together. It gets rid of the silos that are often obstacles to efficient and fast software delivery, and consequently, brings in more revenue. With silos eliminated, devs are free to work and innovate without team friction which ultimately means happier employees. And, the happier your people are, the more efficient your product output will be. What’s important to understand is that DevOps is just as much about company culture and people as it is about processes and tools – and as we all know, it’s all about people.
Is this what you mean by developer experience?
Yes. DevX means creating the best possible environment for the developer to do the most efficient job. This doesn’t mean the developer has to write thousands of lines of code daily, but there shouldn’t be any obstacles for them to do so. Your devs need to be free to innovate and interact efficiently with tools, infrastructure, and clouds.
How does this work in practice?
It’s a trendy topic at the moment, but it really is an “aha!” moment when it comes to understanding the cultural aspect of DevOps. When we say we want to democratize DevOps, we want to empower every end user to interact with tools and the cloud independently, autonomously, safely. This has a direct correlation to business since if your non-DevOps teams are comfortable setting up staging environments, implementing best practices and working independently, software delivery time will decrease. The less developers have to open new tickets to deal with day-to-day tasks, the more time your DevOps team will have to focus on what matters – finessing automation and evangelizing best practices.
Let me give you an example on Cycloid – practice what you preach. We have a team of devs both in back- and front-end who are fully capable of deploying and testing independently using the self-service portal. They can interact with everything we have on Cycloid without worrying about the tech side. This makes a real difference in release times. Simply, the more empowered are your end-users, the better is TTM.
How can DevOps teams improve tech efficiency?
There are some quick wins along the way. For example, getting your infrastructure to a declarative IaC state to make it easier to automate, and that’s something Cycloid can easily help with. Our tool Infra Import can generate IaC Terraform from manually deployed infra on the fly.
Another way is what I’ve already mentioned – you need to ensure the end user is capable of interacting with multiple tools and clouds without fearing they break something. We know that the market is oversaturated with tools (28 tools per dev on average according to Gartner), so it’s important for developer and employee experience that they can interact with all these tools and infra as easily as they do with their smartphone. If you can prove that you’re improving their capability, tech efficiency will grow.
How can DevOps teams ask the executive team to contribute to the establishment of DevOps principles and better DevX? Do they need to?
Important question. DevOps requires a change management mindset and you can’t achieve that if your exec team is not on board. How do you get them on board? They need to understand the business value of DevOps and DevX, understand that teams need and want to evolve and innovate. First the transformation needs to happen within the DevOps team – then they can push the execs. With DevX the situation is a little different. In recent years I’ve seen DevOps teams be reluctant to let go of cloud and infra control which is not the right approach. Cycloid offers a nice middle ground because it offers the space to respect best practices and governance requirements of all teams: business, DevOps and end-users.
What’s the cost of doing nothing or letting DevOps stagnate?
We live in a world where things are going much faster so the only logical solution is to adapt. The first problem you’re going to have is recruitment – with companies striving to create the best experience for their employees, certain positions, like for example, solution architects, will not want to work in an environment where things happen slowly and they don’t feel heard. Secondly, if you let your company stagnate, your competitors certainly won’t. They will be coming out with new solutions faster and better than you, so it’s a matter of keeping up with the market. Third problem – retaining talent will get harder and harder. If you don’t make empowering people your priority, they’ll find a place where it is. So in the current world it is almost impossible to let DevOps stagnate – it’s the future and it’s coming.
We’ve spoken about the business value – what’s the customer value?
Every customer wants the best software as fast as possible and as bugless as possible. At some point, if they don’t see evolution from your product, they will want to move on to a competitor who has evolved. So there’s value there for both sides.
Final words?
Software delivery journey should be just as much about your people as it is about your tech. If you want to have DevOps and hybrid cloud at scale – and I mean for everyone, not just the select few – you need to work on your company culture and choose tools that support this journey. This is the niche that Cycloid fills – opening up DevOps and hybrid cloud adoption for everyone regardless of their skill level through an easy-to-use self-service portal, which in turn facilitates change management in your organization and improves developer experience, reducing time-to-market and bringing real business value to DevOps.
About Cycloid
Cycloid is a DevOps and Hybrid Cloud platform that improves the developer experience (DevX) and operational efficiency to smooth the way for change management and open up DevOps and cloud adoption for everyone. No matter the skill level, every user from dev to CTO can interact with automation and the cloud freely while maintaining best practices & governance. Cycloid is based on your Git, and is tool and cloud provider-agnostic.
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