As a new chief technology officer (CTO), you must put your organization on a path to success. How do you streamline and automate your way to success? DevOps can help with this 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. This article assembles tips and best practices to help you build your roadmap and set your organization up for long-term success.
Assessing Your Tech Stack
The first step in building a DevOps roadmap involves conducting a thorough tech stack assessment to determine if your current stack is supporting or hindering your company's goals. This involves analyzing every element of your tech stack to determine what you actually use and what might be causing bottlenecks.
Two of the main benefits of conducting a tech stack assessment are 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. Tech debt slowly accumulates over time when tasks are postponed due to time constraints. For example, not writing enough tests, not following best practices, and not writing enough documentation can all contribute to tech debt. As a result, debugging issues or making updates becomes difficult because they can introduce breaking changes.
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. As the organization grows and evolves, the tech stack also needs to evolve.
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. These opportunities can range from something as simple as updating tools to their latest versions to something as challenging as switching to a new tool or service.
Accounting for Other Tech Stack Assessment Considerations
Here are a few other things to consider when assessing your tech stack:
- Developers: How many developers do you have on your team? Are there enough to meet your needs? Do the skill sets of the developers align with the tech stack changes you are planning to make? 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? How will the cost change with the changes in the tech stack?
- 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?
How to Perform a Tech Stack Assessment
Here's a basic starting point if you want to perform a tech stack assessment:
- Define goals and scope: Identify why you're performing the assessment. Examples include improving performance, reducing costs, scaling, or adopting new technologies.
- Document your current tech stack: List all technologies, frameworks, programming languages, third-party services, and infrastructure components. Note any external APIs, libraries, or legacy systems that are part of the stack.
- Evaluate current performance: Are tools performing as expected? Are there bottlenecks or inefficiencies? Can the stack handle future growth in users, data, or features? How fast is the system under real-world conditions?
- Assess alignment with business needs: Does the stack meet current business objectives, such as supporting new features or scaling to a global audience? Identify outdated or overly complex components that slow development.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses: Identify what's working well and which components are cost-effective and future-proof. Find out which components have high costs, poor performance, limited support, or security vulnerabilities.
- Benchmark against alternatives: Research emerging technologies or competitors' tech stacks. Compare current stack components with newer or more efficient options.
- Create a report: Create a report summarizing the current state of the stack, key strengths and weaknesses, recommendations, and their business impact.
For more tips and best practices for assessing your tech stack, read How to Assess Your Tech Stack: First Steps for Every New CTO.
For new CTOs, there is plenty of tech to help address almost any issue or exploit multiple opportunities. No-code/low-code cloud automation can help strengthen or streamline your tech stack. According to the industry analysis of DuploCloud, more than 90 percent of developers will use no-code/low-code cloud automation tools by 2025.
To learn more about no-code/low-code automation and how it's helping companies of all sizes, download our free report: The State of No-Code/Low-Code Cloud Automation.
Assessing Your Team
Given the highly competitive market for hiring engineers, it makes sense to prioritize what kinds of engineers your team needs. The best way to achieve this is by using a skills matrix to assess team members' skills and pinpoint areas for growth.
Using the DevOps Skills Matrix
A skills matrix outlines the specific skills that are necessary for a specific role. It illustrates roughly what each person should do and the skills they should have mastered to achieve a certain role.
A skills matrix is a visual tool that maps employees' skills within an organization, providing an overview of strengths and weaknesses. It helps identify skill gaps and development opportunities while outlining the specific skills required for each role. This matrix illustrates what each person should master to succeed in their respective positions. Following is an example of a skill matrix that divides the staff into categories based on seniority and lists a set of skills:
| | Junior | Senior | Lead |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Development | Proficient in carrying out assigned tasks in at least one relevant coding language | Skilled at seeing entire projects through the development process and fluent with multiple coding languages | Capable of planning and coordinating multiple projects within a single development umbrella across multiple languages |
| Operations | Familiar with shell scripts and capable of monitoring relevant systems | Competent in writing complex scripts for distribution across teams and identifying issues based on signal reports | Capable of identifying issues that require a switch in development processes, and vice versa, and advising the process throughout |
| Continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) | Adept in establishing a basic CI/CD pipeline | Capable of using multiple package managers and delivering more complex pipelines | Expert in overseeing complete CI setups and advising on the integration of package managers throughout projects |
| Documentation | Capable of following documentation and submitting requests for further explanation | Proficient in contributing individual entries to documentation as appropriate | Able to plan out a cohesive documentation process and ensure complete coverage |
| Soft skills | Professional in demeanor and solid communication skills | Proactive in coordinating with colleagues to ensure projects run smoothly | Expert in leading teams into new projects and setting a positive, collaborative tone of development culture |
Keep in mind that the preceding matrix is just an example and you should tweak it to fit your organization's needs.
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.
Evaluating the Efficiency of Your DevOps Stack
After you've assessed your team, it's recommended that you perform a DevOps gap analysis. This can help you identify the effectiveness and efficiency of your DevOps processes by identifying gaps between the current state of the organization and the goal of the organization.
Executing a DevOps Gap Analysis
A DevOps gap analysis helps you determine the current status of your technology and team. The following DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics are commonly used to perform a gap analysis:
- Change lead time: This measures the time it takes for a code commit or change to be successfully deployed to production. This metric can reveal bottlenecks in your code review or CI/CD pipeline.
- Change fail rate: This measures how many deployments cause failures in production that require hotfixes or rollbacks. It can help visualize the accuracy of your team by identifying oversights in the code review and quality assurance (QA) processes.
- Deployment frequency: How often does your team deploy code? Keep in mind that more is not always better. Your team may be frequently redeploying code to address problems with previous deployments.
- Failed deployment recovery time: This metric measures how long it takes to recover from failed deployments. It can be useful for gauging how expertly your team handles crises and the efficacy of your monitoring tools.
Keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all value for these metrics. These depend highly on your organization, and you should set realistic targets. For example, when it comes to critical services, such as healthcare and banking, you would rather delay pushing deployments to production and have a rigorous QA process than risk critical errors occurring in production. In this case, it's best to sacrifice the change lead time to reduce the change fail rate.
Applying a Root Cause Analysis
Once you have sufficient metrics and measurements in place, you can objectively measure areas where performance is lagging. A root cause analysis can reveal the source of the problem and enable you to take corrective actions. The root cause may be an issue with your tech stack (e.g. using outdated versions of tools and services), your team (e.g. lack of enough skilled members), or your processes (e.g. a slow code review process).
Application observability is a critical component that can help you in effective root cause analysis. Leveraging observability tools that provide deep insights into system behavior—such as metrics, logs, and distributed traces—helps you monitor the full spectrum of an application's performance. Observability goes beyond traditional monitoring by offering contextual data that reveals what went wrong and why. For instance, when an application experiences latency or downtime, observability solutions can trace the issue to specific microservices, API calls, or database queries, reducing the time spent on diagnosis. This level of visibility helps you pinpoint issues faster.
Based on the root cause analysis results, you can implement the appropriate actions to ensure a smooth and efficient system. Some potential actions include the following:
- Optimizing your tech stack
- Training your staff or hiring more if necessary
- Tweaking your processes to remove bottlenecks
Implementing DevOps: Best Practices for Building Scalable Infrastructure
No matter how thoroughly planned your infrastructure may be, there may be times when you have to spin up or decommission resources unexpectedly. 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.
Automating 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 can significantly reduce deployment times.
Using Horizontal Scaling to Spread Out Workloads
Vertical scaling refers to adding more compute resources to a single node to address scaled-up demand. This approach is relatively easy to execute but challenging to automate, and it can leave you with excess infrastructure even when it's no longer needed.
Horizontal scaling, in contrast, is a method of automatically creating additional nodes that perform the same function. Horizontal scaling is easy to automate, and the additional nodes can destroy themselves when no longer needed. However, depending on the type of work, it may be difficult to distribute among multiple nodes.
Tools like Kubernetes maximize resource utilization through horizontal scaling.
Monitoring Performance and Fixing Bottlenecks as They Arise
Appropriately scaling and optimizing the performance of your infrastructure requires insight into how well it's 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 illuminate issues like underperforming infrastructure or throttling that can make your systems less efficient. They can also send out automated alerts that 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.
Measuring the Maturity of Your DevOps Adoption
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.
Adopting the DevOps Culture
Successfully implementing DevOps initiatives involves adopting a culture of DevOps. This includes raising awareness about DevOps practices, prioritizing continuous learning, and helping teams apply their expertise at different points in the pipeline.
Using Technology
On the technology side, teams aiming to implement as much automation as possible and scalable infrastructure are well on their way to DevOps maturity. These practices allow for greater efficiency and agility as priorities and loads evolve.
Improving Organizational Structure
An efficient organizational structure considers not only current priorities but also anticipates how these priorities may evolve in the future. Otherwise, you risk running into bottlenecks as projects evolve.
Developing clear structures and processes at the start can help you avoid roadblocks that slow down production. However, the structure should remain flexible enough to allow for modifications as needs evolve.
Enhancing 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 focus 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 challenging. The following tips have been assembled to 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 organization has a stake in its tech deployment and with whom you should keep in touch.
- Understand your key performance indicators (KPIs): Learn how your company tracks and defines success, and study those metrics. You can also use this opportunity to tweak the KPIs or 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's worth the effort.
- Execute quick wins: Some tasks take time, but others can be completed quickly. Finding some quick wins can help solidify your priorities and demonstrate to the team that you are on the right track. It can also help build team morale.
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 automation platform, the DuploCloud solution can be your secret weapon, automating and streamlining your way to success. The platform is designed to maximize the output of your engineers and has been proven to accelerate provisioning and orchestration by a factor of ten. The platform has also been designed from the ground up to provision infrastructure that aligns with 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.
