Hashicorp State of Cloud Survey 2022 gives some insightful data about the adoption of cloud solutions in the industry. For example, it's interesting to note that although 86% say they rely on "platform teams", 94% said they were "wasting money on cloud".
While these numbers are shocking, they aren't entirely surprising.
In the early stages of a start-up, the common wisdom is to push the product out, then stabilize it. That's perfect! But before hitting any scale, it's essential to establish DevOps excellence hand-in-hand to achieve the agility that modern products require. Yet, often, that's the last thing on founders' minds until it becomes a problem that holds business back.
Let's take a closer look at the state of your DevOps by examining the DevOps backlog.
Every good product manager ensures that out of the vast, somewhat never-ending wishlist of product stories, they prioritize the critical stories that shape the product.
DevOps Backlog consists of all the stories under the remit of provisioning, configuring, managing, and securing resources for your apps. As the name suggests, dev, ops, and testing teams are the stakeholders. Unfortunately, more often than not, DevOps backlog stories don't get prioritized over core product feature stories. As a result, the backlog becomes large and unwieldy over time, with teams having little or no bandwidth to get around to them. Eventually, these stories get dropped out.
In reality, most companies don't formally capture DevOps stories with the same level of diligence that's followed to capture feature stories. This became evident to us when we talked to over 200 companies.
We wondered if it was just a short-term problem, but to our surprise, even late-stage product companies have a large DevOps backlog! As the business needs grow, complex architectures come in, and regulations change, the backlog keeps growing.
What kind of stories do you have in your DevOps wishlist?
Typically, these stories track your deployments and measure application data and KPIs. Here are some examples:
And the list goes on! Verifying if you have essential stories covered in your backlog is a good practice. You can read this article to learn more about how to spot issues in your DevOps implementation.
Here are some reasons why you end up with a large backlog that is not easy to tackle:
It's critical to tackle DevOps backlog at the right time. We at Facets work with our customers to ensure that you stay on top of your DevOps backlog.
We'd love to hear from you. Contact us to find out more.
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