Overcoming barriers to DevOps

The adoption of DevOps in Communications Service Providers (CSPs) is building considerable momentum, driven by digital transformation programs, cloud migration, and the next generation of software-defined networks. However, making real headway in DevOps requires a broader cultural transformation, and must be planned as an ongoing and evolving program. Though the direct focus is on the software development lifecycle, there are other business and technical functions that must be aligned with DevOps thinking to create lasting change.

The DevOps tech track

As organizations seek greater efficiency and visibility from their software development processes, ultimately leading to improved customer outcomes and value, Agile and DevOps techniques are a natural path to introduce a more rapid and iterative approach. The culture of DevOps implies a responsibility on all participants for the achievement and success of a finished working product and is well suited to a starting point of ‘new-build”’projects in a cloud-native environment. The technical elements impact both development and operations teams as shown in the following table: While this is a convenient and positive starting point for many organizations, extending DevOps to core back-end systems, and ultimately to the network, is a much bigger challenge, and will then impact other business domains, including enterprise architecture (EA), governance, risk and compliance (GRC), and finance.

Aligning business domains

EA is a discipline that needs correct alignment with DevOps as it scales up and matures, and this must happen in both directions. Often in telcos there is a concern that Agile and DevOps can undermine the more structured aspects of architectural planning, but there is now a better understanding in the EA world of how architecture can support the scaling of these approaches. From a top-down perspective, the EA function has an integral part to play in ensuring that DevOps evolves in a planned way, looking at aspects such as DevOps readiness, DevOps tooling and patterns, and DevOps metrics. And from the bottom-up view, the continuous feedback that is a key element of the concept, can be fed back into the EA domain to provide a powerful source of insight and intelligence that makes architectural views more dynamic and reflective of real-world scenarios. Another consequence of DevOps that is often overlooked, particularly in the early stages, is that of governance, risk, and compliance. In the telecoms world where critical infrastructure and regulation are both to the fore, there can be concerns that the automation introduced as part of DevOps reduces the transparency of those processes for risk and compliance professionals in activities such as audits. In the early stages of DevOps maturity, when these processes are more ad-hoc, that can indeed be the case, but as a program matures, it becomes important to integrate DevOps with the work of GRC teams, similar to the way that incorporating security has led to a DevSecOps approach.

When GRC teams work closely with their DevOps colleagues, the data that is generated from DevOps pipelines can provide better traceability of activity that has taken place, and GRC professionals can apply policies and build controls into these pipelines.

A third area that will benefit from better alignment with DevOps is Finance, including program and project finance, and IT operating expenses (OpEx). From a project perspective, typical planning and budgeting processes are very waterfall-centric, with funds being allocated to a project upfront, and (at best) being released to expenditure as work progresses. For IT OpEx in areas such as cloud infrastructure, there has been very little connection or feedback between operational budgeting and business outcomes. Connecting Finance and DevOps can help with both these issues. By moving budget accountability closer to projects (as part of a shared team responsibility), it can provide more accurate intelligence to program and portfolio managers. And by linking operational spend to business outcomes, as part of a value stream management approach, organizations get a much better understanding of whether spend is well-aligned and how it can be optimized. Undertaking a DevOps program at a large scale requires significant transformation over a multi-year period, and for many CSPs it has been difficult to make a compelling business case. Taking this broader approach to align other business functions gives a greater likelihood of longer-term success. Find out more about the benefits, challenges, and best practices for DevOps in telcos, in TM Forum’s recent report DevOps: Where, Why and How.