How Cycloid facilitates your DevOps upskilling program

Amidst the Great Resignation, DevOps talent shortage and the looming global economic crisis, retention of skilled and passionate professionals will continue to be a priority for IT businesses in 2022. After all, skill and talent gaps remain the top hurdle for business transformation, according to DevOps Institute Upskilling Report 2022 that Cycloid co-sponsored. But where do you find the right talent? How do you harvest the much-needed skills?

If you’re familiar with anything that Cycloid does, you know what we’re going to say: upskilling. We maintain that you won’t need to hire an army of DevOps engineers - just a few great DevOps and your best dev team is all that’s necessary to start a DevOps revolution.

Our DevOps and hybrid cloud platform facilitates natural upskilling in your organization and helps all your non-DevOps teams - like developers, managers, FinOps, security, and solution architects - gain DevOps-like abilities in a discreet, straightforward manner. If you already have a dedicated upskilling program (congrats, you’re better than 49% of global IT organizations!), Cycloid can be a great second fiddle to your education efforts, giving your devs space to apply theoretical knowledge in practice.

Here’re a few things we believe in - and a few tools that smooth the way for your upskilling strategy.

Fostering autonomy and independence

The success of your DevOps upskilling efforts is measured by how much work your non-DevOps team can do without involving DevOps experts. Your DevOps team has much better things to do than babysitting developers, like setting up automation, evangelizing, and managing resources. The good news is with a little help, your devs can take the majority of tasks off their plates by servicing their needs independently and interacting with infrastructure modules without extra help.

Self-service portal

We bang on and on about our self-service portal StackForms, but the truth is that it is crucial if you’re encouraging your devs to “shift left”. Remember - don’t them off the deep end, but support their journey! That’s exactly the job of Stacks and StackForms. While your DevOps team sets up the necessary automation in Stacks, StackForms will allow devs to choose these pre-configured environments in a simple drop-down menu. All the technical nuts and bolts are hidden behind an easy-to-use form - and devs feel empowered to interact with infrastructure independently.

Cost Estimation

Imagine how much more powerful your devs could be if they had direct visibility into how much their new instances cost? Cost Estimation is a part of StackForms that gives a real-time estimation of cloud costs. This allows your managers and devs to share the responsibility of cost management and inspires higher trust within teams.

Supporting innovation

Preparing for shifting left shouldn’t lie on the shoulders of devs (which is a mistake companies make all too often). When we speak about upskilling, we encourage it in all teams - including DevOps and non-technical management. Governing large teams and supervising projects without restricting innovation is an art, and more and more platforms are coming out with new governing solutions. Giving your teams the freedom to innovate while maintaining a solid grip on resource and project management is a crucial part of Cycloid’s approach to governance.

InfraPolicies and Quota Management

Learning how to balance governance guardrails with freedom for your developers requires practice - but how much better would it be if discreet governance came pre-built? Cycloid uses Open Policy Agent (OPA) and RBAC to help you set up permissions and minimal privileges behind-the-scenes, ensuring that users have access to specific parts of your infrastructure. Similarly, you can use our newest feature Quota Management to assign hybrid cloud resources such as memory, CPU, and storage to specific teams without worrying about overrunning resources.

Encouraging cross-role behavior

This is the core of any upskilling program and the essence of “shift left” - encouraging members of your team to take on additional responsibilities. There’s a difference however between piling on additional tasks and supporting upskilling. One of the goals of upskilling is to get rid of silo-based thinking and help team members communicate and support each other’s roles. As we’ve written in our previous ebooks, “over-the-wall” thinking can have a detrimental effect on your success, as teams lose visibility into each other’s work. Tooling that supports cross-role behavior and eliminates siloes can be the make-or-break element in your upskilling strategy.

CI/CD pipelines

How do you explain complex pipelines to everyone on your team, regardless of skill level? Same as people have been communicating since the dawn of time - pictures! You might already be using multiple tools to keep track of it, but a true DevOps approach can keep it streamlined and visible to all team members. Our CI/CD module centralizes all pipelines and tasks in a single overview that is open to anyone, regardless of technical background. It stays up-to-date and shows clearly every bottleneck so you can get to the crux of the problem faster.

InfraView

Nothing says DevOps superpowers like understanding the ins and outs of your infrastructure setup. InfraView provides a graphical representation of infrastructures deployed in your project's different environments and inspect the Terraform state information for each instance. The goal is simple: build bridges between teams by providing maintenance-free and up-to-date diagrams that everyone can understand.

Bottom line

Upskilling developers or “shift left” is a strategy that can either endanger or supercharge your software delivery. It’s important to make sure that team members - including management - are prepared for it in advance. There’s no reason to throw your teams into the sea of knowledge and hope they’ll make it - at least throw them some rafts!

That’s why Cycloid focuses on building tools that encourage new knowledge, cross-role behavior, and open communication in teams. After all, if you give your teams the instruments to grow their expertise, it will have a direct impact on the success of your company.

If you’d like to read more about the link between upskilling and developer experience, you’re in luck - we’ve written an ebook just for you! Download it through the link below: