Empowered DevOps

The 2021 IDC Nordics/Benelux DevOps conference theme was "Empowered DevOps." The objective was to investigate how far firms have progressed in empowering DevOps and engineering teams.

Empowerment implies that teams have authority and control over their activities; in other words, teams have the appropriate assistance. It is about working and supporting teams in ways that allow them to take control and responsibility for their activities.

Organizations must concentrate on the correct techniques to manage, empower, and drive growth at scale when software engineering teams increase swiftly. According to IDC, although 80% of big European firms have used DevOps concepts and processes, just 10% excel in increased performance and delivery cycles.

Fundamentally, "Empowered DevOps" is still an idea rather than a reality. The following were the important lessons from the IDC Nordics DevOps conference to "push towards Empowered DevOps":

• Accept the concept of continual learning across teams and code. Enabling software innovation and DevOps at scale requires a never-ending learning mindset. As the keynote from the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) noted, this means starting production as soon as feasible to enable teams to start learning as soon as possible.
• Through automation, focus on improving and developing the way teams communicate. IDC sees progress toward more unified automation techniques, but significant development and capacity disparities exist. According to IDC's Accelerated App Delivery Survey (AccAD)- Sep 2021, one in every four Nordic enterprises takes a segmented approach to automation. In this context, there is a significant danger that any performance difference with firms that use a more unified automated strategy would expand. 
• The most advanced organizations in DevOps automation (12%) have already achieved declarative and policy-driven automation that facilitates the acceleration and adoption of event-driven applications utilizing Kubernetes and/or serverless platforms that can be updated on demand. Another 15% are working to establish communities of practice in order to achieve systematic automation scaling. To gain the advantages of enterprise size, businesses must concentrate on what can and should be reused.
• In a cloud-first world, data management is critical. Managing tool proliferation, increasing application estate complexity, and an explosion of data that requires monitoring and analysis for continuous improvement stall progress and impedes digital innovation initiatives for one in every five Nordic firms (IDC AccAD Survey, 2021).
• Create developer trust and team boundaries! In an atmosphere where change is safe, developers who feel trusted deploy (themselves) more often and in small increments. A very iterative, small-yet-fast release cycle is at the heart of cloud-native; creating an organizational design that pushes the company towards such an operational model is difficult. It is necessary to augment security, compliance, and governance skills in order to offer the appropriate "team" guardrails.
• It is difficult to see cloud natives. A third of Nordic firms have reached the point where cloud native has completely permeated the company. Teams, on the other hand, have difficulties distinguishing and picking up signals from noise. For a quarter of Nordic firms, access to observability data for DevOps teams is limited, as is rigidity in implementing DevOps methods (IDC AccAD Survey, 2021).

Many of these vulnerabilities were highlighted in Veeam's presentation. Highlighting the importance of tackling day 2 operational concerns such as backup, disaster recovery, and the mobility of Kubernetes apps in production as enterprises speed toward a cloud-native future. To support the expanding deployments of cloud-native apps necessitates investment in automated data management capabilities. As cloud-native adoption rises, the lecture emphasized the need for a mentality shift in how companies handle and secure data.

In conclusion, Empowered DevOps requires a shift-left mindset backed up by automation at each level of the software delivery pipeline.