patternModerate
Can I found a small company on DevOps?
Viewed 0 times
cancompanyfoundsmalldevops
Problem
Suppose I am en entrepreneur with little seed money for my Great Idea (TM) and I start a company initially planning to implement my Great Idea (TM) on my own and hire additional help on a basis dictated by the rate of company growth.
Frequently, answers on this site center around the idea that DevOps is not a role, but a new way of doing things with a new philosophy of operation that allows a team of roles to actually do DevOps. This prevents burnout and people from feeling like a lone wolf
As a fledgling and budding company, then, should I even bother to pursue DevOps as a philosophy, or is this only appropriate for a more mature operation capable of having a development team of sufficient size?
Frequently, answers on this site center around the idea that DevOps is not a role, but a new way of doing things with a new philosophy of operation that allows a team of roles to actually do DevOps. This prevents burnout and people from feeling like a lone wolf
As a fledgling and budding company, then, should I even bother to pursue DevOps as a philosophy, or is this only appropriate for a more mature operation capable of having a development team of sufficient size?
Solution
DevOps has three parts: Tooling/automation, Organizational, and Cultural.
You're basing your organizational structure and process' on your business' maturity. Which is smart. My experience in a startup and with a fortune 1000 company has afforded me the experience to denote that starting with DevOps is better for company growth. It's efficient and fits nicely with agile.
Tooling
Being your maturity is really young, you should buy your DevOps process as saas products to reduce time to market. Instead of Jenkins use circleCI or similar product. Instead of VM's and docker, use Heroku. Try and incorporate the toolset but do it in a manner that works for the size of your business. If deploying code manually takes 4 hours a week and automating it in 1 hour saves that. Do it.
Organizational
Also from an organizational standpoint, you will naturally start with all developers as the responsible party for operations/features even product development. Take a look at http://web.devopstopologies.com/ for organizational structures. Our startup started with type 2, and as we mature will move toward type 7.
Cultural
DevOps is simply teamwork. Work together and everything gets easier. It usually is a problem because leadership doesn't keep this in mind so as you start out, ensure that everyone is apart of the business. This is also reflected in agile.
So in short, yes pursue DevOps but do so at the level that meets your business maturity.
You're basing your organizational structure and process' on your business' maturity. Which is smart. My experience in a startup and with a fortune 1000 company has afforded me the experience to denote that starting with DevOps is better for company growth. It's efficient and fits nicely with agile.
Tooling
Being your maturity is really young, you should buy your DevOps process as saas products to reduce time to market. Instead of Jenkins use circleCI or similar product. Instead of VM's and docker, use Heroku. Try and incorporate the toolset but do it in a manner that works for the size of your business. If deploying code manually takes 4 hours a week and automating it in 1 hour saves that. Do it.
Organizational
Also from an organizational standpoint, you will naturally start with all developers as the responsible party for operations/features even product development. Take a look at http://web.devopstopologies.com/ for organizational structures. Our startup started with type 2, and as we mature will move toward type 7.
Cultural
DevOps is simply teamwork. Work together and everything gets easier. It usually is a problem because leadership doesn't keep this in mind so as you start out, ensure that everyone is apart of the business. This is also reflected in agile.
So in short, yes pursue DevOps but do so at the level that meets your business maturity.
Context
StackExchange DevOps Q#2721, answer score: 10
Revisions (0)
No revisions yet.