As Chief of DevOps and Partner at Zühlke, I have spent over two decades helping companies continuously deliver value. In this video, I walk through the complete Zühlke DevOps offering, from our understanding of DevOps and the challenges of scaling it, to our concrete service offerings including the Digital Factory and the Platform Plane.
The Problem: Broken Value Streams#
When I visit companies, I frequently encounter the same picture. Business creates great plans in Jira tickets and Word documents, then throws them over a wall of confusion to development. Development implements something and throws it over another wall to testing. Testing checks it and throws it to operations. Operations struggles to get it running, and the customer says: “This is not what we wanted.”
The root cause is the silo organization. Business, development, testing, and operations all work in separate silos with different goals and no real alignment. The value stream, visualized as that blue infinity symbol, is interrupted by walls of confusion. There is also a lack of software engineering excellence across this value stream.
DevOps is the solution. It is a mindset, a culture, and a set of technical practices that allows us to organize across the value stream so that all people work together to continuously deliver value to the customer.
DevOps is all about bringing all the people, process, and technology together to continuously deliver value. This is what DevOps is.
The Challenge of Scaling DevOps#
The numbers speak for themselves. The State of DevOps reports show that high performers achieve 973 times more deployments than low performers. DevOps delivers faster time to market, more value for money, higher quality, higher customer satisfaction, and top qualified employees. Every CIO wants exactly that.
But doing DevOps in one team is already challenging. Doing DevOps at scale is even harder. Some companies try to solve it by creating a “DevOps team” between development and operations, which just introduces another silo. The real solution is product teams with all people together. But that introduces inconsistencies, redundancies, and a massive cognitive load.
The tooling alone is overwhelming. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline does not start and end with CI/CD. It includes continuous exploration (requirements engineering, backlog management), continuous integration, continuous deployment, and release on demand with feature toggles. Each of these areas requires specialized tools that need to be maintained and integrated. On top of that, teams must master all the technical practices of modern software development, handle onboarding of new people (which can take days or weeks for access provisioning), and ensure both quality and security.
The Digital Factory: The Target Picture#
What every company needs is a Digital Factory. At the top level, a board of directors has a vision and strategy. A Portfolio Kanban holds all the big ideas as Epics. The board prioritizes and selects the most promising Epics. Product management breaks Epics into features. Product teams work in an agile way, breaking features into user stories that flow through the Continuous Delivery Pipeline.
The Platform Engineering team provides standardized pipelines for new teams so they can be productive immediately. The whole system delivers value to the customer, gets feedback back, and continuously learns. These are the three ways of DevOps.
The Digital Factory has four layers:
- Lean Portfolio Management connecting strategy with execution
- Product Management organizing teams working on products
- Product Teams doing DevOps, building, running, and owning their products
- Platform Team developing, building, and maintaining the platform
The Platform Team provides standardized tools so product teams can work efficiently. The platform covers application runtime and compute, DevSecOps (automated security shifting left), access and identity (morning onboarding, evening offboarding), centralized security, observability and monitoring, and everything teams need to focus on feature development instead of infrastructure.
The Zühlke DevOps Offering#
Zühlke is a global service provider with over 2,000 people across 17 offices in ten countries. Founded in 1968, it is still in the hands of partners. The capabilities span Digital Consulting, AI and Data, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Digital Experience, Software Excellence, Hardware and Electronic Development, and DevOps.
Our DevOps offering has six pillars:
1. DevOps Engineering and Consulting: Everything from value stream engineering to continuous delivery and release orchestration, helping you move from projects to products with state of the art product delivery.
2. Quality and Continuous Testing: You cannot scale when your quality is bad. Shift left, build quality in from the beginning, invest in test automation and continuous testing.
3. Digital Factory: A lean transformation approach for multiple teams, whole organizations, or the entire enterprise. It transforms your organization into a Digital Factory where you continuously deliver value, reduce lead times, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction and employee happiness. It is completely tailor-made, based on blueprints and building blocks.
4. Platform Engineering: Implementing an internal developer platform with all observability, metrics, and Kubernetes as a service. This is the foundation of the Digital Factory.
5. Application Modernization: For companies with legacy applications and landscapes. We do software evaluation, enterprise architecture, and transformation of single applications or complete landscapes.
6. Turnaround: When a project or product is in trouble, we help get it back on track, making it more reliable, resilient, and increasing its release ability.
The Platform Plane#
The Platform Plane is an accelerator asset built at Zühlke. It links best of breed tools into an outstanding user experience. It is much more than just a developer portal.
The Platform Plane includes:
- Application Runtime and Compute: Kubernetes as a service, API Gateway, service catalog, and managed ingress
- Developer Experience: Portal, CLI, application templates, networking, and tunneling
- DevSecOps: Automated software composition analysis, secret detection, SAST, and license scanning
- Access and Identity: Self-onboarding for teams with immediate access to all connected tools
- Centralized Security: Firewall support, WAF support, and network topologies out of the box
- Observability: Open Telemetry stack, managed dashboards, and FinOps KPIs
- GitOps: CI/CD pipelines, secret management, and ready-made pipeline templates
The architecture integrates tools through adapters. Tools are not welded together into a big ball of mud. Each tool is integrated through an adapter and a unified integration block, then connected through an automation and provisioning layer. This allows new tools to be added easily and existing tools to be replaced when they become obsolete.
We are entering the Age of Industrialization of Software Development. Platform Engineering builds the platform, which is the foundation of your Digital Factory and enables teams to do DevOps.
What a Holistic Digital Factory Requires#
Building a Digital Factory requires a holistic approach:
- Scalable Architecture with good APIs for product development
- DevOps and Software Engineering practices across the value stream
- A Platform as the foundation for product development
- Data and Analytics so management and teams can make the right decisions
- Customer Centricity with great end-to-end customer experience
- Agile Product Delivery with backlog management, dependency management, and team management
- Product Management with lean portfolio management connecting strategy to execution
Key Takeaways#
- Broken value streams from silo organizations are the root cause of slow, low-quality software delivery
- DevOps at scale requires a Digital Factory approach with Lean Portfolio Management, Product Management, Product Teams, and a Platform Team
- The Platform Team provides a standardized platform so product teams can focus on delivering features
- Zühlke offers six DevOps services: Engineering and Consulting, Quality, Digital Factory, Platform Engineering, Application Modernization, and Turnaround
- The Platform Plane integrates best of breed tools through adapters, ensuring tools can be swapped without disrupting the platform
- The Digital Factory is a holistic lean transformation approach covering architecture, DevOps, platform, data, customer experience, and agile delivery