Sharing Is Caring With DevOps
In this final blog on the DevOps CALMS model, we end on S for Sharing. Now I have to be honest, the first time I saw the CALMS model I initially questioned whether ‘Sharing’ was really needed. I mean, surely with the right ‘Culture’, then this would ensure sharing anyway? Even in my blog on culture I mentioned the need to shift from organizational silos to a collaborative model – which must include sharing, right? Well yes it does, but sharing (or collaboration) is really the core value of DevOps adoption. Without sharing, you can forget about having the right culture, your employees accepting automation, embracing Lean and having measurements that work. This is how important Sharing and collaboration is to DevOps success.
So What Do We Need To Share?
It would be easy for me to answer ‘everything’ but this is not going to help. In the software-defined business, where apps are key to commercial success, then it’s essential that every participant in the planning, designing, building, deploying and supporting of apps is able to share information about their area/responsibilities/tasks and to be able to communicate, without friction, with each other. It must be easy to feed back information to teams involved earlier in this process and also feed forward. In the DevOps world these are referred to as feedback and feed-forward loops. The following diagram hopefully conveys this better than I can put into words:
App Performance Monitoring And Feedback
To share the information highlighted in the diagram above requires mechanisms and appropriate solutions – and application performance monitoring is a necessity here. It’s a necessity along with other solutions that remove friction in communication, such as HipChat, amongst others, that promote easy sharing and collaboration.
Without a good APM tool it’s near on impossible to feed back, accurate and timely data about how applications are performing in production; information on end-user experience; and information relating to application code issues. APM is essential in helping your organization to run faster.
In fact a great APM solution should provide the software-defined business with situational awareness. This is a concept, which comes from US Marine training and refers to the fact that Marines on the battlefield need timely and accurate information to make the next decision and the next move. This is what a great APM solution should provide for your business, dev, test and operations teams – timely information to make the next decision in order to enhance software strategy.
The Virtual War Room
At AppDynamics we have gone a step further in order to promote collaboration in the enterprise, with our virtual war room feature that allows business, dev and ops teams to collaborate on an emerging app issue. The war room allows everyone to see the same screen, add and create charts and graphs that update in real time. Importantly we also provide the ability for participants to communicate with each other by an integrated chat function. This means that everyone can be looking at the same information or same source of truth, which helps speed up Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) of emerging application issues.
Sharing Means Going Beyond DevOps To BizDevOps
While sharing information inside IT, so from Architecture to Operations is important, at AppDynamics, we believe that it should go beyond this. In the software-defined business every function is accountable for software success. Therefore it’s essential for feedback and feed-forward to and from line of business teams in marketing and product management. Again at AppDynamics we make sure that the information from monitoring and from our application analytics solutions is easy to be shared with anyone in the business.
So for successful DevOps adoption you need to focus on BizDevOps and the feedback and feed-forward loops should look more like this:
As always, your feedback and comments are welcome. What are your views on Sharing and DevOps?
