DevOps isn’t Cheap

There are the tangible costs of around the infrastructure necessary to support your journey.  And there are the intangible costs associated with things such as:  lost development velocity, and the intrinsic cost of the necessary organizational change.  I do want to be clear that in this case infrastructure in this instance not only refers to the servers supporting the new tools that you will need to acquire, but also the cost of any new software that you will need to purchase to support your automation, along with the supporting business “infrastructure” (redefined teams, new processes, etc).  Licensing costs and the trade-off of different version of software, Visual Studio Professional vs. VS Enterprise and IntelliJ vs Eclipse as examples, is an exercise best left to the reader.

Let’s not forget about the cost of employee turnover either.  As an ex-developer, I always found that the companies that I didn’t like working for, were the ones where their PROCESSES got in the way of me performing at the level that I felt I was able to achieve.  If you have been following my posts you will probably see a common thread in regards to DevOps; it is about the people and process, where tooling supports these two pieces of the DevOps philosophy.  Also, as I like to provide thought provoking questions in my posts, I want to pose this one to you, the reader, “How much do you spend on licensing for numerous different tools, how much does down time cost you, and how much does employee turn-over cost (or how much does it REALLY cost to hire a new engineer due to acquisition costs, and reduced productivity)?”

So how can the business justify an evolution and modernization to their current software development practices?[...]

 

To read the whole post and interact, please visit the SogetiLabs blog: Inverting the supermarket