DevOps Maturity: How to become a high-performer with low-code
Every development team has the same mission directive: deliver more and faster without compromising quality and stability. After all, as more of our lives move online, every business must become a software company to stay relevant and competitive.
The pressure is on to join companies like Adidas, a sportswear brand that operates like an elite, high-performing software company. After adopting cloud-native, Adidas decreased time to deploy from 6 weeks to 3x a day — with the actual deployment dropping from 3 days to just one minute.
This is the vision and the goal of our app-driven future.
And to meet it, organizations need to embrace cloud-native development to gain the speed, scale, and flexibility needed for industry disruption, continued relevance, and business resilience. They need to become mature, high-performing DevOps teams that have mastered cloud and elite software delivery.
The big question, however, is how to get there.
How to Measure DevOps Maturity
DORA, a Google Cloud research arm, has been conducting academically rigorous research on software development and delivery for eight years.
In their State of DevOps report, DORA identifies the four most relevant metrics for delivery and targets for elite teams that drive strong business outcomes:
- Deployment frequency: Elite performers deployed code 973x more frequently than low performers.
- Lead time for changes: Elites were more than 6,570x faster.
- Time to restore service: Elites recovered services 6,570x faster.
- Change failure rate: Elites had a 3x lower failure rate.
This DevOps maturity model enumerates the qualities and capabilities behind the quick-moving, iterative change-making, innovative companies that can truly deliver high-quality apps and services at a high velocity.
Think Netflix, Uber, Amazon.
These organizations that perform at these highest levels, engage in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and can deploy multiple times a day or on demand. It typically takes less than an hour to bring changes to production and less than an hour to restore services. And the elite change failure rate is less than 15 percent.
Yet, notably, in the 2022 DORA report, the researchers removed the “elite” status, ranking respondents' phases of DevOps maturity only as low, medium, or high. They wrote:
Challenges to Become an Elite-Level DevOps Organization
DORA hypothesizes that ongoing pandemic effects may be limiting developers’ opportunities to learn from one another, thus stifling advancement and innovation.
There are two other factors to explore:
● The tech talent shortage
● The mass transition to cloud-native apps.
In our research on the State of Cloud Application Development (SoCAD), we found out that while 72% of surveyed IT managers and devs expected the majority of their apps to be created using cloud-native development in 2023, only 47% said they know a lot about cloud-native development.
When asked if they needed to grow their engineering teams to implement cloud-native development, a majority (between 60% and 70%) of respondents said they want to hire for 11 of the 13 roles we listed.
This shows us that talent is key — but talent is also scarce, and it’s obvious not all organizations have access to it.
At the same time, many teams lack experts in the intricacies of cloud-native development.
According to our survey, the top challenges facing cloud-native leaders include:
● Identifying the right tools/platforms (52%)
● Architectural complexity (51%)
● Setting up the infrastructure (50%)
● Keeping tools and infrastructure up to date (48%)
In sum, you must bring apps to market faster than ever, in more complex environments, and without an ideally staffed team of experienced developers. Within this context, it is unsurprising that elite levels of performance waned in 2022.
The good news is that there is a streamlined way to undergo DevOps transformation to reach elite levels of performance — whether your organization currently ranks as low, medium, or high.
Becoming a High-Performer Organization with a High-Performance Low-Code Platform
There is a myth that low-code development platforms aren’t robust or fully featured enough for the serious apps and services that today’s businesses need to build. Many believe these platforms can assist with simple tactical apps, but not cloud-native apps that make-or-break business KPIs.
But that myth is just that — a myth.
High-performance low-code platforms like OutSystems have evolved light years ahead of tactical no-code and “regular” low-code predecessors to enable developers to build serious, strategically important apps without being experts in every aspect of cloud-native architecture.
We built our platform atop three tenets, all of which foster high performance and innovation for our customers:
- Serious productivity via abstraction, automation, and modern CI/CD practices.
- Serious apps built on state-of-the-art managed cloud infrastructure.
- Evergreen technology that is always on, always up to date, and with pain-free upgrades.
You can build apps for any use case and easily evolve those apps as requirements change.
Build apps that access sensitive data, operate in strict regulatory environments, integrate core business processes, and play a critical role in the customer journey.
And with the OutSystems platform latest advancements, you get out-of-the-box functionality specifically for cloud-native applications and services.
The OutSystems Developer Cloud (ODC), that we launched a few months ago, enables our customers and partners to deploy applications that support cloud-native capabilities, such as containerization, microservices, Kubernetes, and serverless computing.
This makes our platform incredibly scalable.
Because OutSystems abstracts or automates many key capabilities of elite software delivery, you can scale these services across your entire application portfolio without duplicating efforts.
Explore How OutSystems Can Help You Become an DevOps Elite Performer
Like cloud-native app development, it seems low-code is here to stay: the OutSystems SoCAD report found that 60% of cloud-native development leaders say low-code is a winning solution, and 83% of all respondents estimate they’ll develop most of their apps with low-code platforms by the end of 2025.
