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Accelerate: A Principle-based DevOps Framework

In this article series, we’re discussing the following three principle-based DevOps frameworks. The first was The Three Ways as described in The Phoenix Project and The DevOps Handbook.

Framework #2: Accelerate’s Technical and Management Practices of High-Performing DevOps Teams

In Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, authors Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim present research that surfaces the key technical and management practices that high-performing DevOps teams have adopted and continue to refine.

Technical Practices

According to Accelerate authors, the technical practices used by high-performing DevOps teams are focused in three key areas:

  • Continuous Delivery
  • Architecture
  • Product and Process

Continuous Delivery

The Accelerate authors chose to combine several different practices, each important on its own as a discipline, under the umbrella of continuous delivery (CD). Although CD itself is its own principle, keep in mind that high-performing DevOps teams are doing all of these things in concert with one another to achieve a truly exemplary continuous delivery model:

  • Version Control
  • Deployment automation
  • Continuous integration (CI)
  • Trunk-based development
  • Test automation
  • Test data management
  • Shift left on security (DevSecOps)
  • Continuous delivery (CD)

Architecture

When it comes to DevOps architecture considerations, the characteristics that most high-performing teams were likely to agree with were the following:

  • “We can do most of our testing without requiring an integrated environment.”
  • “We can and do deploy or release our application independently of other applications/services it depends on.”

The Accelerate authors are quick to mention that the type of technology used, no matter how popular, is no guarantee of high performance:

“…employing the latest whizzy microservices architecture deployed on containers is no guarantee of higher performance if you ignore these characteristics.”

In fact, the characteristics described above—testability and deployability—are achieved by implementing the following (Read more...)

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Sonatype Blog authored by Ember DeBoer. Read the original post at: https://blog.sonatype.com/principle-based-devops-frameworks-accelerate