In the modern world, services change as often as necessary. While constantly building and pushing new features are exciting, it becomes a headache to coordinate and troubleshoot when issues arise. In hyper-growth organizations, engineering teams struggle to keep track of what’s being changed across a larger group and the cascade effect it has on the dependencies. Consequently, teams become frustrated when it’s harder to communicate what problems resulted when they no longer have visibility into the changes.
Here are 3 ‘adoptable’ DevOps practices that are critical to a scaling organization:
1. Collaboration is key.
When problems arise, expanded ‘DevOps’ teams should be able to easily share forensics, root cause analysis and annotate events that occur within the product deployment stream. This allows communication to expand beyond a ‘small-team’ reach, and the results are available for anyone who has access to the tool. Everyone can share their learnings for anything at any time, creating a cohesive learning environment.
2. Democratize the tools.
All tools must be accessible and approachable to anyone willing to spend the time to learn the basics of tooling. For example, if the ability to query log files is limited to the 3 people who are ‘certified’ on a tool, you’ll always be limited to a team of 3 who can only solve that problem– no matter how big your environment is. It creates a bottleneck that can result in serious (business) consequences.
3. Spread ‘recognition of value’.
Learn to and focus on effectively communicating the value of what you do. DevOps practices provide incredible time-saving and cost-saving values (think: less downtime, quick MTTRestore), and teams need to highlight (and evangelize) how these initiatives are critical to the success of the business. This will help with the adoption of DevOps practices to larger involved communities and create a larger impact across the organization.
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