Why you should care about Platform Ops
Are you struggling to meet customer demands quickly and seamlessly? The power of Platform Ops will enable you to deliver customer value at speed, scale and with reduced risk to your firm.
Capabilities over culture
We used to think building the right culture was at the centre of what it meant to use DevOps and that by creating that culture, effective DevOps would follow. But as time has gone on it’s become clear that fundamentally, effective DevOps comes when key capabilities are enhanced. And by doing this, a culture of DevOps will follow.
By focussing on the practical capabilities of DevOps, such as automation, continuous integration (CI) and deployment, DevOps is able deliver business value and achieve lasting improvements to a development platform’s speed, quality or reliability.
In short, let’s not get hung up on creating a ‘culture of DevOps’, but instead focus on targeting and improving capabilities that allow us to deliver code to production faster and more reliably. More importantly, let’s provide value to the firm’s profits, productivity and customer satisfaction.
Join the discussion
Maya Ber-Lerner (CTO at Quali) and I recently caught up to discuss the benefits of Platform Ops and how firms can implement it into their way of working. Listen to our conversation here.
Platform Ops – what is it?
Platform Ops has grown out of the popularity of DevOps. It aims to streamline processes involved in scaling a DevOps practice, allowing developers to focus on development and firms to focus on their customers, rather than their processes.
If we want to scale DevOps capabilities beyond a single team, and more importantly retain the knowledge, we need to rethink how we structure DevOps teams, we need to start turning the capabilities of DevOps into products and services of which development teams are the consumers. The essence of Platform Ops is turning DevOps capabilities into products and services.
The role of a Platform Ops team is to provide operational services to development teams in a way that allows them to go on to self-serve. Their services can be diverse, and often multiple Platform Ops teams will be required; but these services could include monitoring, dashboarding, infrastructure creation, CI/CD pipeline creation, bootstrapping of new projects, security services and testing. In short, any areas where there can be consistency between development teams.
Ultimately, it’s not about deploying code faster, it’s about delivering customer value at speed, scale and with reduced risk to the firm.
Getting back to business
By using Platform Ops, firms are able to provide a self-service platform that enables their developers to quickly, reliably and safely deploy code. And at the same time it ensures best practice, governance, and access to the latest technologies, are baked in.
Firms are able to scale the DevOps capabilities of their development teams and create a true and lasting DevOps culture throughout the firm with Platform Ops.
But at its heart, Platform Ops means firms can meet customer demand quickly and seamlessly – putting the focus back on the business de-risking projects by ensuring that all development teams are able to take advantage of a much broader range of operational skills such as security, cloud cost reduction and monitoring.
Find out more
Download our whitepaper on DevOps at scale in the real world.
Maya has written a response to the white paper that unpacks Platform Ops.
Get in touch
6point6 has a wealth of knowledge and experience in helping firms to develop, embed and scale their DevOps capabilities.
