CALMS Framework for DevOps Transformation

Introducing CALMS in DevOps

A commercial enterprise has two important pillars: development and operations, which are dedicated to escalating and heightening the productivity of an organization. Where developers are devoted to creating and improving the applications, operations manage the creation process of services and products.

What is DevOps?

In contrast to earlier times, where both the teams used to work separately, now both the teams are working in coordination, which is called DevOps. It can be seen as a concatenation of the development and the operations team. This approach helped organizations maintain consonance with the evolving market changes and achieve business results more frequently, efficiently, and rapidly growing.

As more and more businesses migrate to the its process, defining the right path to its transformation strategy was important. For this, Jez Humble, co-author of “The DevOps Handbook,” coined the acronym CALMS (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing), a comprehensive framework that assesses a company’s ability to adopt it.

A process in which, Modern software engineering Culture and Practices to develop software where the development and operation teams work hand in hand. Click to explore about, What is DevOps and it's Processes?

What is CALMS Framework?

DevOps and all its allies, including business, IT operations, QA, InfoSec, and development teams, and how they collectively deliver, deploy and integrate automated business processes. CALMS is a cipher for Collaboration, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing. It is structured around metrics that help organizations analyze its structure and its feasibility in any organization.
The CALMS model provides a framework that works as a reference to compare the maturity of its team and reckon the state of teams for the transmuting change that goes with it. As the business demands are growing organizations need to lean towards faster through reliable ways of developing products.

Culture

Inter and Intra team communication, the pace of deployment, handling outages, development to production cycle cohere culture in an organization. It has led to a culture change fostering the traditional development process. It can be seen as an evolution of agile teams, the difference being that the operations team is included. Earlier, developers mainly focused on building and developing products while the operations team handled features like availability, performance, security, and reliability. It provides a culture where the development and the operations team can collaborate for any incidence reporting that may cause business problems. For modern business purposes, the issues need to be resolved quickly, which is possible the teams have one source of data. This leads to a collaborative and shared responsibility environment.

DevOps culture promotes increased transparency, communication, and alliance between the teams. The inclusion of automated processes fosters the SDLC, thus promoting organizational success and enhancing team performance.

An agile approach or culture where both development and operational teamwork continuously together with each other while building a quality product. Click to explore about, Building DevOps Build Pipeline

Automation

Systems can be made reliable by eliminating repetitive manual work, which can be done through automation. The companies that are new to automation start with continuous delivery. The code is passed through many automated tests, then packed up the builds and advanced to environments through automated deployments.
To implement iterative updates faster and with total efficiency, automation helps to add technology to the tasks with reduced human assistance. By integrating API-centric design with automation, teams can deliver resources swiftly with supported proof of concept, development, testing, and deployment. This facilitates the development and operations team to deliver the product to customers faster and efficiently.

Tests executed by computers are more trustworthy and transparent than humans. These tests catch security vulnerabilities and bugs and inform the IT/Ops, thus helping to reduce failure sustainability at the time of release.

Lean

In it, the lean process allows development teams to deploy quickly and imperfectly. The present software development culture finds it better to launch the product into the customer’s hands as soon as possible than to wait for the product to be perfect. In the context of it, teams assume that failure is inevitable and can happen anytime.

Lean revolves around
Escalating customer value
Eliminating repeated tasks
Continuous monitoring and improvement
Setting up and working on long term goals

It can fully utilize lean methodologies by delivering value products to customers and aligning with the business.

Measurement

Data metrics play an important role in implementing best practices in the its environment. A successful DevOps implementation should measure the people metrics like feature usage, service level agreements (SLAs), their feedback, etc.
Data can help analyze the performance, business workflow, customer feedback, etc. This data teams to make decisions could be more useful when shared with other teams. IT performance includes four measures:

Deployment frequencies.
Lead time for changes.
Meantime to restore.
Change failure rate.

It must look into two types of key measures: inputs and outcomes.
For example, if the development team wants to add new features to the product, but you are seeing a high customer churn over other aspects of the product, the data you provide could be helpful.

Sharing

Collaboration of teams converges better communication among the members. It do not expect a developer to possess the skills of an operations specialist. Rather it forages both the development and the operations team to work together throughout the development lifecycle. Breaking down the Development and operations siloes leads to more reliable deployments, faster product releases, and better feedback and trust between customers and teams.

Sharing is necessary for organizations adopting it to create an environment of candor and empowerment for SDLC. An organization can achieve expeditious development by promoting learning and spreading best practices throughout teams and processes.

Assessment for DevOps enables your organization to identify the new opportunities where you can use it and associated technologies with the greatest business impact and ROI. Click to explore about, DevOps Assessment

Conclusion

Though DevOps is based on software tools and processes, it mainly focuses on enabling culture and people. It support a blameless culture, where teams focus more on resolving customer issues than finding who caused the bugs. Organizations shifting towards automation have to build the relationship between the operations and the development team. CALMS framework ensures the best way to assess the extent and capability of an organization to lean towards its methodologies.