Do you still need governance & management if you’re working with DevOps?
An increasing number of organizations quite rightly want to make governance & management as lean as possible, especially when they switch to working with DevOps. The question they then ask is whether governance & management is really still needed and if so, what the minimum requirements should be. We provide a brief answer to that question in this paper. Of course, a longer answer is also available and, needless to say, we realize every situation is different.
In this positioning paper, we outline the following:
The case: DevOps teams working with outsourced infrastructure
As an example, let’s take an organization that outsourced its infrastructure to a service provider years ago and has also introduced more and more cloud solutions in recent years. Meanwhile, application development and management has become increasingly based on DevOps: product owners set priorities and DevOps teams are responsible for new features and application management. Reluctantly, the teams are expanding their application management to a 24/7 service. However, this management does not extend to the infrastructure. Suppliers and internal infra teams are therefore responsible for this. The organization is wondering what kind of governance & management is still needed.
The four forms of governance & management needed in a DevOps environment
DevOps services have the great advantage of being developed and managed in conjunction with the business. In principle, no governance & management is needed. However, because there is almost always an environment that consists of other services, internal and external standards as well as suppliers, we see that adding the following forms of governance & management is usually necessary (also see Figure 1):
Figure 1: Possible DevOps governance & management
How governance & management develops as an organization changes as a result of DevOps and cloud
Our example organization also needs four forms of governance & management. We are, however, aware that most DevOps teams see this as restricting their autonomy. In time, we, therefore, expect the following shifts:
Governance & management is and will remain a continuous process, whereby the organization in which it takes place must continually change in step with the governance & management objects. Governance & management always means customization!
Written by Ronald Israels and Menzo Meijer, Principal Consultants at Quint.
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