Good DevX key to scaling DevOps, says Orange Business Services CTO

Good developers are hard to find and easily disillusioned - so look after them, says Philippe Ensarguet

The most recent State of DevOps report by Puppet found that while the majority of organisations have made a start with DevOps, for around three-quarters of those, scaling the practice outside of a few core teams was proving difficult. Having brought the Dev and Ops teams together, problems with evolving roles, skills shortages and retention, insufficient feedback loops, unclear responsibilities and failure to share best practices, were extremely common, the report found.

This was certainly the case at Orange Business Services, the B2B arm of the Orange Telecom Group. Speaking on a virtual roundtable arranged by DevOps company Cycloid, CTO Philippe Ensarguet said that anticipated productivity gains after various mergers and the introduction of Agile and DevOps hand did not happen. Developers were unhappy, and the systems were not joined up.

So the company started focusing on improving developer experience (DevX) to ensure its 4,000 or so developers did not see themselves as mere cogs, were happy and productive, and not weighed down by excessive management of toolchains and other non-core duties. After all, DevOps talent is hard to come by and expensive.

This required pushing through a software factory approach, with standardisation of methodologies and a recognition that skilled developers can't be expected to do everything, as tends to happen in the early days of DevOps adoption.

"The day we decided to care about the experience, the journey of the team and the way they access to the tools was a game changer," Ensarguet said.

DevOps toolchains are typically built up from lots of disparate open source components, generally selected and integrated by the developers themselves, which is fine in the early days and indeed can be a useful learning process, but it's not really scalable, particularly in a large organisation, where dozens of such toolchains may co-exist alongside choices of cloud services and other methodologies. This free-for-all can get in the way of sharing best practices and shortening feedback loops.

In essence, said RedMonk analyst James Governer, a good developer experience - meaning creating an environment where they can do their best work - requires taking some of the developers' choices away, and tipping the balance of priorities towards the team rather than the individual. There are too few individuals with the breadth of experience to both produce high quality code and manage the tool chain, so systems must become more opinionated, he said.

Governer added that for good DevX the makeup of DevOps teams needs to change, to bring in more specialised groupings, such as SREs or experts in the toolchain, which might seem to be a step backwards from one team focusing on one product, but needn't be if managed in a modern, agile way with proper feedback loops.

For large organisations a platform engineering approach to the toolchain is vital, said Ensarguet, otherwise the developers will never be able to keep up with the demands of the business.

Orange has adopted a GitOps approach, where the Git repository is the definitive source of truth, since it has the entire history of a project embedded in it, and with automated frameworks built out from that base, including implementing infrastructure and policy as code, so as much of the configuration, compliance and security aspects as possible are taken out of the developers hands.

That way, he said, developers can get on with what they do best, and new joiners can slot in much more easily. If developers are to be closer to the end product in terms of being responsible for requirements, build and run, then someone else needs to look after the pipeline, Ensarguet said.

"My point is not to say that we need to scale down the tech. That's not the case. What we need to do is to scale up the experience."

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