We read with interest a recent article from CloudBees published in The New Stack: How Culture Will Make or Break Cloud Native DevOps and have seen some highly differing views on where the adoption of DevOps is.

The Cloudbees article starts by saying that “Software delivery cycles are becoming faster thanks to DevOps-backed continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) as production pipelines are increasingly ported to scale with microservices on cloud-native environments. But the organizations that are able to achieve this rapid development and scaling must first embrace a DevOps backed culture – which most organizations have yet to adopt.”

They reference a Forrester research report and add their perspective that “only roughly half of all organizations had implemented DevOps in 2017, roughly 10 years after DevOps as a concept and practice emerged.”

Yet if you follow the link to the Forrester report summary, Forrester is boldly touting that 2018 is The Year of Enterprise DevOps and they now say that in 2017, with 50% of organizations implementing DevOps, DevOps has reached “Escape Velocity”, and that the DevOps momentum is occurring within all industry sectors with healthcare, banking, insurance and manufacturing sectors leading the charge.

We also want to mention a recent article by Anders Wallgreen entitled The Great “DevOps Engineer” Title Debate. Anders wrote that according to LinkedIn, DevOps Engineer is currently the most recruited engineering job. He also interviewed Jayne Groll, CEO of The DevOps Institute to better understand her perspective, and then goes so far as to say “it certainly points to the fact that DevOps is now 100 percent in the mainstream”.

So why the differing views? Is 50% adoption considered positive or negative? And more importantly, why is DevOps as a practice taking so long to emerge?

The DevOps “movement” has been talked about for a long time, but not always practiced, and when it is, it is not without its challenges. This has been a massive culture shift for siloed organizations not always used to collaborating and working together, in many cases, this was not a pleasant merger, many came kicking and screaming. And there was no ‘template’ for how it should work.

The Cloudbees article goes on to say “it can thus be assumed that those who make the cultural shift are at a strong competitive advantage – at least for now”. In our opinion, echoing that of Forrester, those that embraced it have seen many key benefits: the greatest being Agility and Speed – and are finding ways to adapt culture to enable these advantages.

Enter Cloud Native and Serverless architectures and a DevOps culture becomes even more critical for success.

What is it about Cloud Native and Serverless that mandates the removal of silos and collaboration across the enterprise for success? The New Stack surveyed thought leaders and executives at the recent DevOps World / Jenkins World 2018 and states that “they agreed that creating the culture that removes the walls between all stakeholders within an organization, including business, operations, teams, operations and developers may not be easy – yet it is increasingly seen as the essential framework on which to build cloud native applications and architectures”.

Jayne Groll said “in truth, a DevOps engineer should be a T-shaped systems engineer who can support the transformation of people, process and automation in an organization”. Collaboration among people and teams is a key component.

We could not agree more! We see the next critical phase of culture shift for DevOps – and one that will not take 10 years – is the integration of finance and lines of business into DevOps. We call this FinDevOps. How does this look? What are the critical factors?

  1. First of all the organization has to have a single source of truth for cloud related costs – in real time – not so easy to do today without the proper observability platform.
  2. Secondly, it enables DevOps engineers to be accountable for costs and understand the implication of their actions.
  3. Thirdly, it enables collaboration across DevOps and the organizations who are impacted by costs outside of the development organization.

Just as we believe that serverless is a spectrum and organizations are in different phases of adoption – we see that organizations and their adoption of DevOps is on a spectrum – some are further ahead than others, some are still lagging behind, but to truly leverage cloud native and serverless, organizations must adapt culturally to FinDevOps to compete.

Reference Articles
CloudZero Team
Author: CloudZero Team
This blog post was written and reviewed by the CloudZero team. Combined, our team has more than a quarter century of experience in the cloud cost space. Every blog post is extensively researched and reviewed by several members of our team for accuracy and readability.

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