Agile Chennai 2021 Achieving High DevOps Maturity through Platform Engineering Practices - by Satish Chandran Director, DevOps and IT Security, Gain Credit

2. What is DevOps?
AWS describes DevOps as the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that
increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and
improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and
infrastructure management processes.

3. Gartner’s definition: DevOps is a business-driven approach to deliver solutions using agile methods,
collaboration and automation.
Team Focus on
Business Outcomes
DevOps teams must focus on customer business outcomes, rather than their own individual metrics.
The success of the team and of every individual is assessed by the degree to which the business metrics,
business process requirements and customer needs are being met.
Iterative Product
Creation Process
DevOps builds on agile principles, iterating toward a goal as the primary feature of its philosophy. The
goal is to create and improve a product that delivers revisable business outcomes, rather than to run a
project with deliverables defined upfront.
Continuous
Principal Processes
DevOps organizations are continuously optimizing and experimenting with new processes, tools and
even organizational structures.
Extensive people
collaboration
DevOps doesn't succeed unless all stakeholders have a set of common objectives and trust that their
colleagues "have their backs." This is facilitated through transparent and frequent communications
among relevant team members, with frequent feedback sought and given.
Removing
Constraints from
entire Delivery
Process
DevOps looks at the holistic impact of changes in organization, process and technology to remove as
many constraints as possible from the IT service delivery function.
Using Automation
To deliver at speed (and scale), the DevOps technology framework must be designed primarily for
automated execution, where as much work as possible is performed by programmatic means, with
human intervention only by exception.
Source: Gartner (2017)

4. Value Drivers for DevOps
Source: n=95 Gartner Research Circle Members who use DevOps approach
Q06. Which of these outcomes has DevOps created for your organization?
Faster cycles times and realization of business value are the most frequent organizational outcomes from
DevOps
Courtesy: Gartner Research

5. Is your style of DevOps mature?

6. Evolution of DevOps Practice
Courtesy: State of DevOps 2021 - Puppet

7. Story Time….
PO
Security
PO
Developer DevOps
1w 2w 1w
1w
1w

8. Clear problem statement, but solutions?
There is no silver bullet but let us discuss how I saw this addressed in my experience.
TEAM (AND WORK) STRUCTURE MATTERS
SRE
Platform
Engineering
Value
Stream Pods

9. Platform Engineering
What do they do? Can we walk through an example outcomes?
● Onboarding a new service into Production
● Common logging module
● Common Instrumentation module
● Automated Quality Gates (Enforcing Security and Compliance Requirements)
With the goal of empowering Developers to be in control of their successes
(and failures)

10. Platform Engineering
What do they do? Can we walk through an example outcome?

11. Platform Engineering - DEMO
A quick peak into an outcome of Platform Engineering practice.

12. Moral of the story…
PO
Security

13. Let’s find out using Data Insights
Courtesy: State of DevOps 2021 - Puppet

14. Key Performance Indicators
● Time to Market (Ideation to Production Delivery)
● Cycle Time
● Innovation Markers
● Cross Skilled Team
● More quantifiable KPIs as seen in the Value Drivers slide

15. Takeways
● Approx. 75% of the DevOps organizations get stuck at Mid-Maturity. Watch
out for perspectives that hold us back.
● Team Structure & How we organize work matters!
● Self Service, Scalability & Modularity at the heart of everything you deliver.

16. Thank you!
Open for questions
We are Hiring! Contact us at
Satish.Chandran@gaincredit.com

17. Appendix
● Demo of an output from Platform Engineering Team

18. CI Configuration (jenkins) as a Code
github : https://github.com/jenkinsci/docker
● Transparency into jenkins job configuration for the developers
● Reliable re-provisioning
● Solid change management process
● Helps with compliance requirements in regulated industries
● Manage secrets effectively
● No longer the single point of failure in SDLC

19. Scalable CI Slave Cloud
https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Amazon+EC2+Container+Service+Plugin
https://github.com/jenkinsci/azure-acs-plugin
● No more build wait time
● Elastic - pay as you use
● Ephemeral - clean workspace
● Easy to update (replace the docker image!)
● Portability between clouds (in-house and public)

20. CI & CD Framework as a Code
repo 1
repo 2
repo 3
repo 4
repo 5
DSL Controller Job
lint build security scan publish
test pack publish
lint build test deploy to A promote to B promote to C
lint build
unit
test
promote to A
api
test
security
test
lint build
api
test
promote to A
UI test

22. CI & CD Framework as a Code
https://jenkinsci.github.io/job-dsl-plugin/
https://github.com/esbtools/jenkins-job-dsl-pipelines/tree/master/pipelines
● Jenkins JobDSL helps creating dynamic pipelines
○ Can help us implement `developer driven pipeline patterns`
● Pipeline 2.0 (jenkinsfile) is the latest, but is not a replacement for JobDSL
○ Complements JobDSL
○ Ability to handle branch builds

23. Few other important foundational concepts to scale
● Decoupled Test Automation Framework
○ Granular Test Case Management
■ Ability to Re-Run failures alone on-the-fly
■ Ability to Run selective test cases
● ML based post release monitoring
○ Use industry standard prediction algorithms to analyze your metrics pre and post release
● Self Service
○ Eliminate human interaction to gain access to resources (env provisioning, ssh access et
all)
● Telemetry
○ Instrumentation should make the key metrics available via logs or health end-points
● Anything that eliminates wait time or manual processes