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If you’re wondering where to start with DevOps, our 2018 State of DevOps Report provides a ton of prescriptive guidance based on real-world experience and backed by data from over 3,000 respondents to help you get started on your journey and achieve success faster.

Our research also identified five foundational practices that have a big impact on the entire DevOps evolutionary journey. Those practices are:

• Reusing deployment patterns.
• Using a configuration management tool.
• Allowing a team to configure monitoring and alerting for the service it operates.
• Reusing testing patterns for building applications or services.
• Empowering teams to contribute improvements to other teams’ tooling.

To help you prioritize implementation of these foundational practices, Andi Mann, chief technology advocate at Splunk, and co-author of this year’s report, wrote a paper that dives deeper into each of these practices.

What I love most about the foundational practices is that you can start small and build your practice, until, before you know it, you’re one of those highly evolved organizations that you hear about at all the conferences.

For example, we all know that monitoring and alerting is a critical practice, but did you know that highly evolved organizations are 24 times more likely to enable teams to define their own monitoring and alerting criteria for applications and services in production than the least-evolved organizations? Maybe you’re not quite at the point in your evolution where you can just provide an API for teams to configure monitoring as code. That’s OK. You can start small by dropping a monitoring config in a location that other teams can easily access or provide a web interface for teams to configure monitoring.

If you’re struggling with where to get started, pick one of these practices and identify the route that addresses a clear need for your team or adjacent teams and gives you quick results. It’s likely that you’re already doing many of these practices in some form or another. Evolving your practice means looking for opportunities to share and reuse known good patterns so other teams can benefit.

We hope you find this paper useful and as always, we appreciate your feedback. Please email us if you have any questions or comments.

Read the 2018 State of DevOps Report.

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