How to Think about DevOps: It's a Journey, not an Either/Or Choice

People tend to describe DevOps, the “agile” approach to software development and delivery, as something an organization either does or does not do. Yet in reality, DevOps is a journey, rather than an either/or proposition. Here’s what that means, and an explanation of how to “do” DevOps.

We’ve explained the meaning of DevOps before, so I won’t rehash it in detail here. Suffice it to say, however, that DevOps is all about reducing barriers between collaboration, making software delivery modular and adding scalability to the development and deployment process. All of these practices make workflows more “agile,” one of the keywords in the DevOps lexicon.

DevOps Stages

What remains less well understood is that there are different stages of DevOps. Organizations don’t jump overnight from an old-fashioned approach to app development to one that is completely DevOps-based. Instead, they tend to progress along a continuum, which looks something like this:

You could define the DevOps journey in other ways, of course. There are no hard-and-fast rules that delineate the difference between one stage on the DevOps spectrum and another.

Nor is there any single tool that is absolutely necessary to use in order to be considered agile. These things are specific to each organization.

The more important consideration is simply to recognize that doing DevOps and becoming agile is a process, rather than something you either do or don’t do. In addition, it’s important to keep in mind that even if your organization has adopted some DevOps practices already, there is likely more that it can do to increase its agility.

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