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What are some methods to measure the ROI for DevOps?
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Problem
DevOps is complex, and involves many non-deterministic aspects like culture and process.
What are some ways to measure DevOps initiatives for success?
How do you prove to a business that the investment they have made is returning (or saving) real dollars?
What are some ways to measure DevOps initiatives for success?
How do you prove to a business that the investment they have made is returning (or saving) real dollars?
Solution
Great question! Most of us know investing in DevOps practices is a highly worthwhile pursuit for myriad reasons; we don't often justify DevOps on the impact to the bottom line alone, though.
Note: this is something of an opinionated question, and my answer is likewise, opinionated.
Tensibai wisely suggested we find the right metrics, and he used time-to-market as an example. This is a great big-picture approach.
As an alternative approach, my experience with bean-counters is that they don't need to--or necessarily want to--know the big-picture, they just want evidence of fiscal responsibility. They want to see a trend in the right direction.
Here are just a few fiscal wins:
Showing that you're money-conscious and you have a few clear wins is often sufficient. I've certainly missed some obvious examples; feel free to add comments below.
Note: this is something of an opinionated question, and my answer is likewise, opinionated.
Tensibai wisely suggested we find the right metrics, and he used time-to-market as an example. This is a great big-picture approach.
As an alternative approach, my experience with bean-counters is that they don't need to--or necessarily want to--know the big-picture, they just want evidence of fiscal responsibility. They want to see a trend in the right direction.
Here are just a few fiscal wins:
- calculate the server costs saved by leveraging auto-scaling in the cloud
- for income-generating sites, extrapolate the cost-per-minute of downtime, then show improvements in MTTI and MTTR
- again, for income-generating sites, estimate the cost-per-minute saved by leveraging highly-available architecture based on past incidents
- if you've improved on your build and deploy pipeline, show that you've reduced regressions and errors in production caused by already-tracked faults
- if you've made improvements to developer test environments, or even the tools and configuration on developer laptops, look at commit histories to see if new engineers are making their first contributions sooner after joining
- perform a full cost comparison between cloud and on-prem, much like Gitlab did recently, to justify your infrastructure spending (a.k.a. savings!)
Showing that you're money-conscious and you have a few clear wins is often sufficient. I've certainly missed some obvious examples; feel free to add comments below.
Context
StackExchange DevOps Q#427, answer score: 17
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