Events of 2020 accelerated the cloud adoption and digital transformation strategies of many businesses. So, it’s no surprise that our top five blogs of the past year are those that focused on DevOps, technical debt, operational maturity and cloud migration. Our writers offer thoughts and advice on themes that impact scale-ups and enterprise organisations alike.
Top five DevOpsGroup blogs of 2020
1. The role of DevOps in Gartner’s strategic tech trends
When Gartner predicted that hyperautomation would be the number one strategic tech trend for 2020, we predicted that DevOps would have an important part to play.
Ed Pearson wrote about how DevOps uses automation to help drive wider digital transformation, modernisation and ongoing improvement. Of all the blogs we published in 2020, this generated the most interest. And key points, such as eliminating toil so teams can focus on work that increases job satisfaction and adds measurable value, are just as relevant today.
2. The technical debt quadrant
We highlighted the principles of the technical debt quadrant to help readers make prudent decisions that result in better products and lower total cost of ownership.
There’s no doubt that technical debt poses a challenge for many businesses. Whether it’s the inevitable start-up baggage or a hangover from low investment in IT after the 2008 economic slump, it needs to be managed with care. However, as Steve Thair argues, not all technical debt is bad. His blogpost exploring Martin Fowler’s technical debt quadrant struck a chord with many readers.
3. Five ways DevOps helps with technical debt
This post offered practical guidance on how to tackle the huge amounts of technical debt that are often uncovered during migration to the cloud.
Many organisations only realise the extent and severity of their technical debt when they decide to move to the cloud. Steve shared his thoughts on how DevOps approaches can help.
Here’s a quick round-up of the main points:
1. Create DevOps product teams
2. Build shared self-service platforms via InnerSource
3. Use DevOps automation to repay tech debt
4. Use containers to simplify app deployment and management
5. Use DevOps to build an API-centric model
For the full details click here.
4. Simplifying your options for cloud migration
Bringing simplicity to cloud migration with a straightforward overview of the main ways to get there.
OK, so this post wasn’t written in 2020. But its enduring appeal with readers shows that cloud migration challenges haven’t gone away. It’s not just about getting to the cloud, it’s about how and when you modernise applications to make the most of the new environment.
Rael Winters talks about evolving applications during migration or following a lift-and-shift. In our experience, this is the most effective approach for the majority of applications moving to the cloud. It adds more value than a lift-and-shift, but it’s quicker and less risky than a rewrite.
5. Operational maturity: what it is, why you need it, how to get it
In this blogpost, we looked at how tech scale-ups can improve infrastructure and operations to help achieve their growth potential.
When rapid growth is on the cards, it pays to look at operational maturity and identify areas of the IT infrastructure that need attention. Yet it’s not always easy for scale-ups to strike an effective balance between the time and energy invested in operability versus innovation.
Steve looks at resources and approaches from Google and AWS that can help you find the best way forward in this post.