How to streamline and automate your way to success
As a new CTO, one of your most important challenges will be putting your organization on a path to success. DevOps can help you by facilitating a culture of shared responsibility and collaboration, ensuring your teams work well together to achieve their common goals. But DevOps isn’t a quick fix, it’s a methodology that can take time to master.
Building a DevOps Roadmap is a crucial first step to implementing DevOps. We’ve assembled the following tips and best practices to help you build your roadmap and get your organization on its way.
DevOps Roadmap Step 1: Assessing Your Tech Stack
As the first step in a DevOps roadmap, the tech stack assessment will help you determine if your stack are working for your company or against it. This involves analyzing every element of your tech stack to determine what you actually use and what might be causing bottlenecks.
The benefits of conducting a tech stack assessment as part of a DevOps roadmap include addressing tech debt and identifying opportunities.
Addressing Tech Debt
Tech debt is the accumulated stress on an organization resulting from expedited delivery of tech versus spending time addressing its problems. Assessing your tech stack can help you identify tech debt and make eliminating it a part of your roadmap.
Identifying Opportunities
Your existing tech stack might have been built to address the organization as it stood when it was built, but might not be complementary to the organization as it stands now. Assessing your tech stack as a part of building your DevOps strategy roadmap can help you identify opportunities to streamline processes or implement new solutions.
Other things to consider
- Developers: How many developers do you have on your team? Are there enough to meet your needs? What will it cost to hire more?
- Cost: How much do the elements of your tech stack cost, and how does that cost scale as your organization grows?
- Scalability: In addition to the cost scaling, will the tech itself scale to meet the needs of your organization in the future?
- Support: What level of support is offered? How much time will your team spend debugging someone else’s code versus their own?
For new CTOs, there is plenty of tech to help address almost any issue or exploit multiple opportunities. No-code/low-code automation can help strengthen or streamline your tech stack. According to DuploCloud's industry analysis, more than 90% of developers will use it by 2025. To learn more about no-code/low-code automation and how it is helping companies of all sizes, download our free report: The State of No-Code/Low-Code Cloud Automation.
For more tips and best practices for assessing your tech stack, read How to Assess Your Tech Stack: First Steps for Every New CTO.
DevOps Engineer Roadmap: Skills Matrix
Given the highly competitive market for hiring engineers, it makes sense to prioritize what kinds of engineers you need on your team. A DevOps skills matrix will help you identify your specific needs and recruit the best people.
What Is a DevOps Skills Matrix?
A DevOps skills matrix spells out the different skills and abilities a DevOps engineer should possess at every stage of their career. It illustrates roughly what each person should do and the skills they should have mastered at each rank in your organization.
A skills matrix will help you identify the capabilities of your existing team as well as any skill gaps that may exist due to a lack of staffing or education.
DevOps Gap Analysis
A DevOps gap analysis will help you determine how to train or hire your existing staff to cover those gaps. Use the following metrics as a guide.
- Lead Time for Changes: This measures how long it takes to compile and deploy new code. It can be useful for determining the efficiency of your team.
- Change Failure Rate: This is a measure of how often flawed code makes it out the door. It can help visualize the accuracy of your team.
- Deployment Frequency: How often does your team deploy code? Keep in mind that more is not always better. Your team may be frequently re-deploying code to address problems with previous deployments.
- Mean Time to Recovery: This metric measures how long it takes to recover from downtime, regardless of the source. It can be useful for gauging how expertly your team handles crises and the efficacy of your monitoring tools.
To learn more about how a skills matrix can help assess your team, read The DevOps Skills Matrix: How to Identify Gaps on Your Team.
DevOps Implementation Roadmap: Best Practices for Building Scalable Infrastructure
No matter how thoroughly planned your infrastructure may be, there may be times when you have to unexpectedly spin up or decommission resources. Scalable infrastructure is the key to addressing traffic spikes or other unpredictable complexities without opening yourself up to unforeseen issues.
The following best practices will help ensure your infrastructure is appropriately scalable.
Automate Wherever Possible
Automating everyday developer tasks — such as testing, deployment, or provisioning — speeds up development times, improving efficiency and reducing overall time to market. It can also help eliminate human error, reduce security vulnerabilities, and improve the user experience.
If an element of your infrastructure can be automated, it should be automated. DuploCloud can help by automatically provisioning a secure and compliant cloud infrastructure that will help reduce deployment times.
Use Horizontal Scaling to Spread Out Workloads
Vertical scaling refers to adding more compute resources to a single node to address scaled up demand. This can be relatively simple to execute but is hard to automate and will leave you with additional infrastructure even if you no longer need it.
Horizontal scaling, on the other hand, is a method of automatically creating additional nodes that perform the same function. The advantage of horizontal scaling is that it can be easy to automate, and the additional nodes can destroy themselves when no longer needed.
Tools like Kubernetes maximize resource utilization through horizontal scaling.
Monitor Performance and Fix Bottlenecks as They Arise
Appropriately scaling and optimizing the performance of your infrastructure requires insight into how well it is performing in the first place. This is most efficient when managed in real-time.
DuploCloud offers a unique Automation Platform with built-in tools to view metrics across your entire infrastructure. These tools will illuminate issues like underperforming infrastructure or throttling that can make your systems less efficient. They can also send out automated alerts that will allow you to stay on top of any issues.
To learn more about scalable infrastructure, read How to Build a Scalable Infrastructure: DevOps Leaders’ Best Practices.
The DevOps Maturity Model
Many DevOps roadmap examples include an analysis of the organization’s level of DevOps maturity. This is an assessment of four aspects of DevOps adoption: culture, technology, structure, and collaboration.
Culture
Successfully implementing DevOps initiatives involves adopting a culture of DevOps. This includes prioritizing continuous learning and helping teams apply their expertise at different points in the pipeline.
Technology
On the technology side, teams aiming to implement as much automation as possible and scalable infrastructure will be well on their way to DevOps maturity. These practices allow for greater efficiency and agility as priorities and loads evolve.
Structure
An efficient organizational structure will keep in mind not only the priorities that exist today but also how priorities might change. Otherwise, you risk running into bottlenecks as projects evolve. Developing clear structures and processes at the start can help you avoid roadblocks that will slow down production.
Collaboration
DevOps philosophy is built on an expectation of smooth collaboration. It demands that different teams work together efficiently. Engineers should focus on shared goals and how to work toward them rather than focusing on their individual tasks.
For more details on DevOps maturity models, read DevOps Maturity Model: A Checklist for CTOs.
Tips for Startup CTOs
Whether you’ve been elevated to the role or have entered from outside the organization, being a startup CTO can be a challenging position. We’ve assembled the following tips that will help you excel at your new job — and keep it.
- Identify Stakeholders: Communication is a huge part of being a successful CTO. Learn who in your org has a stake in its tech deployment and with whom you should keep in touch.
- Understand Your KPIs: Learn how your company tracks and defines success and study those metrics. You can also use this opportunity to establish your own metrics based on technical roadmap examples.
- Transition to a DevOps Culture: In DevOps, open communication between development, operations, and QA is essential. Building a culture of DevOps can take time, but it is worth the effort.
- Execute Quick Wins: Some tasks take time, but others can be completed quickly. Finding some quick wins you can rack up will help solidify your priorities and demonstrate to the team that you are on the right track.
For more tips, read How to Be a Startup CTO: 9 Tips for Your First 100 Days.
Build Your DevOps Roadmap with DuploCloud
As a dedicated DevOps platform, DuploCloud’s solution can be your secret weapon, automating and streamlining your way to success. Our platform is designed to maximize the output of your engineers and has been proven to accelerate provisioning and orchestration by a factor of 10. The platform has also been designed from the ground up to provision infrastructure that aligns to rigorous security and compliance standards. To learn more about how DuploCloud can help you build your DevOps roadmap, reach out today for a free demo.
