DevOps Implementation Guide [Plan, Strategy & Steps]

Implementing DevOps allows you to build software more iteratively and ship individual changes faster. This provides a competitive advantage, as you can deliver value to customers more quickly. DevOps guides the entire software lifecycle by determining the workflows that will be used.

It’s important to make a clear plan before you start implementing DevOps in your organization. This gives you an opportunity to evaluate different solutions, consult stakeholders, and identify mitigations for any potential problems. In this guide, we’ll explain the key steps to include in your DevOps strategy, aiming to give you an actionable starting point for creating your implementation.

What we will cover:

1. What is DevOps? Why is DevOps important?
2. How to implement DevOps?
3. 6 key steps for your DevOps implementation strategy
4. DevOps implementation roadmap
5. How to measure DevOps implementation success?
6. DevOps tools
7. DevOps best practices
8. A tool to help you implement your DevOps strategy

DevOps is the process of accelerating software delivery throughput while simultaneously improving quality and the developer experience. It combines automated tooling with collaborative working methods to shorten feedback loops and facilitate more effective coordination between developers (Dev) and operators (Ops), as well as other teams such as product managers and security specialists. DevOps uses tools and processes to eliminate this divide, enabling developers to get closer to infrastructure while operators can better understand developer requirements.

What are the 5 pillars of DevOps?

The five pillars of DevOps are fundamental principles that guide the implementation and practice of DevOps. They are Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing (CALMS):

• Culture emphasizes collaboration, openness, and shared responsibility.
• Automation speeds up processes like testing, deployment, and monitoring.
• Lean focuses on eliminating waste and improving efficiency.
• Measurement ensures data-driven decisions for improvement.
• Sharing fosters knowledge exchange and transparency among teams.

Benefits of implementing DevOps

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A successful DevOps implementation should increase delivery velocity, produce sustained software quality improvements, and support developers so they feel more satisfied in their roles. The combination of accelerated throughput and increased reliability can seem contradictory, but it’s achievable by building scalable systems that make your delivery process more consistent.

Read more: 15 DevOps Benefits for Business

What DevOps is not

DevOps is not a specific tool or software — it’s a cultural and organizational shift that promotes collaboration between development and operations teams. It’s not a replacement for traditional roles like sysadmin or developer but rather an approach to integrating them.

DevOps is not a one-size-fits-all solution; it requires adaptation to a team’s unique needs. It’s not solely about automation, although automation is a key part of it. It’s also not only about deploying code faster; it’s about improving collaboration, quality, and efficiency across the whole software development process.

There’s no single way to implement DevOps because the term describes the culture that allows a successful software engineering environment to emerge. It depends on structuring your organization in a way that not only supports cross-discipline collaboration but also specifically encourages it at all stages of the delivery process.

Implementing DevOps must begin by connecting different teams so they can understand their pain points and uncover ways to help each other. This needs to be backed by a clear plan for what DevOps should achieve, expressed as measurable metrics — such as a 2x increase in deployment frequency — so everyone knows whether they’re on track.

Once this basic DevOps culture has been established, DevOps implementations can be expanded by introducing automated tooling to further unify teams and increase delivery throughput. The strategy is then continually reviewed to assess what’s working well, producing a continual cycle of improvement.

DevOps is usually managed by a dedicated team of engineers skilled in automation, infrastructure management, observability, and quality control. However, all developers have a role to play in promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing between different teams.

An effective DevOps strategy can be created by following six main steps that take you from planning what DevOps should achieve to measuring your implementation’s success.  The steps are:

1. Attain organizational buy-in.
2. Define objectives and success criteria.
3. Shift work left.
4. Automate delivery processes.
5. Embrace continuous feedback.
6. Regularly review and iterate to drive improvements.

Here’s how to get started with DevOps in your organization.

Step 1. Attain organizational buy-in

It’s vital to first gain acceptance of DevOps principles within your organization. For DevOps to succeed, everyone needs to understand why the methodology is being introduced and how it’ll affect their work. Team members should feel invested in the strategy, so they’re motivated to help it succeed.

Buy-in is required at all levels of the organization, from developers up to product managers and team leaders. Some individuals may be resistant to DevOps, particularly if they fear their workload will increase when they have to collaborate more frequently. Clearly communicate how these concerns will be mitigated, such as through increased use of automation or the creation of focus time periods that protect developers from distractions.

Step 2. Define objectives and success criteria

Specific objectives make it more likely that your DevOps initiatives will succeed. Practicing DevOps always has the overarching aim of accelerating software delivery, but what will that acceleration look like in practice for your team?

Creating clear success criteria allows you to measure performance and check whether strategy changes are needed. Criteria can be based on any metric that’s relevant to your SDLC, such as deployment frequency, failure rate, or the amount of time required for new developers to become productive. 

Visualize what your SDLC would look like with those improvements applied to determine whether they’re appropriate aims.

Step 3. Shift work left

“Shifting left” refers to bringing work forward so it happens earlier in the software development cycle while encouraging involvement from multiple teams. Shifting left was originally applied to security tasks, but the idea can also be utilized more broadly — code tests, infrastructure provisioning, and even soft launches to customers can all be shifted left so you can assess results more quickly.

Adopting a shift-left strategy supports quality initiatives by enabling problems to be detected sooner. It also increases the likelihood of selecting the best approach, compared to leaving issues until later in development when there may be fewer options to resolve them.

For example, including security specialists at your cycle’s earliest point could enable a vulnerable new proposal to be spotted at the planning stage. This allows the design to be modified before any code is written.

Read more: DevOps Security Challenges & Best Practices

Step 4. Automate delivery processes

Once you’ve established the cultural changes discussed above, add tooling that lets you automate and standardize your delivery process. This accelerates your DevOps throughput by reducing the amount of work that developers and operators must complete manually.

You have a wide selection of technologies to choose from, but it’s best to start by focusing on the fundamentals of IaC, CI/CD, and automated testing. These increase consistency by removing repetitive tasks from developer workflows.

Creating a platform engineering team helps orchestrate automation initiatives. Platform teams implement DevOps practices by building purpose-built tools that solve developer problems. Developers can use the platform’s facilities to achieve their objectives, such as starting new environments or retrieving observability data.

Step 5. Embrace continuous feedback

Implementing tight feedback loops is crucial to the success of any DevOps implementation. You need to architect your processes so that they’re observable by design, with developers able to quickly analyze the results of changes using easily accessible logs and metrics.

Like the rest of DevOps, continuous feedback is facilitated by a combination of automated tooling and collaborative working methods. Incorporate real-time communication channels into your workflows, then integrate them with the DevOps systems you use — such as by combining Slack and Spacelift, so developers and operators are notified when infrastructure changes occur. 

These mechanisms reduce the need for team members to manually check system states or wait for information from their peers, allowing them to continue with meaningful development.

Step 6. Regularly review and iterate to drive improvements

DevOps implementations don’t stay still. Your team’s requirements will change over time, so you’ll need to regularly iterate on your strategy to ensure it remains effective. Use your success criteria in conjunction with feedback collected from developers to gauge the actual effects that DevOps is having on your workflows.

Problems could range from missing functionality to tools that take too long to run or that aren’t accessible to the developers who need them. Addressing these issues as you find them will result in steady improvements that lead to ongoing DevOps success. Iterate gradually in each area, then review your metrics again to determine whether individual changes are having the effect you intended.

As we’ve outlined above, DevOps strategies should start from a set of objectives that can be used as success criteria. It’s easiest to use measurable metrics that allow you to analyze trends over time. This will remove any uncertainty around your DevOps performance.

The four DORA metrics of Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Time to Restore Service are good starting points. These values have been proven to be effective indicators of a team’s DevOps maturity.

The most adept teams will deploy frequently, have short lead times, experience few failures, and recover quickly when an incident does occur. Your DevOps strategy should facilitate improvements in these values, such as by reducing lead times by involving more stakeholders in planning stages or leveraging automated incident detection tools to reduce service restoration times.

Tools themselves do not define DevOps, but knowing the available options that fit your processes and goals can lead to a smoother and more successful DevOps implementation.

If you are looking for a more detailed list, check out the 73 Most Useful DevOps Tools.

Here are five key best practices to help you establish a strong DevOps foundation:

1. Foster collaboration and blameless communication – Break down team silos between development, operations, security, and other departments to encourage open communication and shared responsibility. Focus on a culture of learning and collaboration to drive successful DevOps adoption.
2. Adopt continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) – Integrate code frequently and automate deployments to catch issues early and release updates quickly, improving software development speed and quality.
3. Automate testing to ensure consistency and speed – Including automated testing as part of the CI/CD pipeline allows teams to validate code changes quickly and consistently without relying on manual intervention. It also frees up developers to focus on building new features rather than performing repetitive tasks.
4. Embrace Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and self-service models – Treat infrastructure like code to automate setup, version control, and testing, making changes more reliable. A self-service model allows developers to provision their resources, increasing speed and reducing bottlenecks. This enhances agility while maintaining transparency and control.
5. Incorporate security early in the software development lifecycle – Embed security into each stage of the CI/CD pipeline to catch vulnerabilities early and reduce risks. DevSecOps promotes a shared responsibility for security across teams. This approach ensures compliance without compromising delivery speed.

Spacelift is an IaC management platform that helps you implement DevOps best practices. Spacelift provides a dependable CI/CD layer for infrastructure tools including OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, Ansible, and more, letting you automate your IaC delivery workflows.

Spacelift is designed for your whole team. Everyone works in the same space, supported by robust policies that enforce access controls, security guardrails, and compliance standards. You can manage your DevOps infrastructure much more efficiently, without compromising on safety.

With Spacelift, you get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, or Spacelift’s Kubernetes operator, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

DevOps accelerates software delivery by bringing development and operations teams closer together. Establishing a culture of joint responsibility, shift left working, automation, and short feedback loops enables you to iteratively build changes at an increased pace, resulting in a competitive advantage.

In this guide, we’ve described the six main stages of a DevOps implementation plan with their expected outcomes. Although DevOps is often perceived to be all about tools and technology, it’s really a mindset shift that revolves around DevOps culture, collaboration, clear objectives, and continual measurement. Identifying metrics that’ll tell you when predetermined success criteria are met is critical to the long-term effectiveness of a DevOps initiative.

Do you plan to implement DevOps in your organization? Or maybe you are seeking ways to improve your processes? Book a demo with our engineering team to discuss your options in more detail.