The Cycloid origin story - people, process, tools

The DevOps triad - people, process, and tools - sounds simple, but it's infinitely more complicated in the wilds of the enterprise. Founder Benjamin Brial saw the challenges first hand, moving him to create Cycloid. He tells the Cycloid origin story and explains his motivation for a new way of "doing" DevOps.

We’re in a continuously transforming digital world where everything accelerates and revolves around three basic facets: organization, people, and tooling. This is what DevOps itself is based on and it’s worth delving into each facet in turn. 

The traditional goals of rationalization, efficiency, and profitability are still key business drivers but mindsets  are changing and expectations have dramatically evolved. Management is under the spotlight - it’s not managers and management anymore, it’s team lead and coaching. More and more organizations are moving towards new operating methods and business models that favor innovation as much as a more respectful approach to teams. 

Cycloid agrees. At both a strategic and operational level, we’re moving towards a teal organization paradigm. This translates to full transparency - teams are involved in every company decision. The road map is clearly defined, salary information is transparent, there’s free access to financial data, team-based recruitment, 360º annual reviews, remote-first organization, etc

Organization: silos must go

In many organizations, IT departments are split between architecture, development and operation teams. These teams all have different goals - some pursue flexibility, while others crave governance and this difference is a source of frustration. DevOps requires strategy and a different type of team - silos need to be broken down before the team can truly work together as one.

So how to proceed while ensuring team buy-in? Businesses have to find the model that works best for them: bear in mind that each organization is different, evolves at its own pace and that the human factor plays a key role in implementing change. People-first buy-in is essential - many of the greatest barriers to DevOps aren’t tools or architectures, but people’s minds. 

People: a shortage of suitable profiles

In the search to build bridges between development and operations, a solution emerged: recruiting hybrid profiles that possessed skills traditionally associated with a variety of roles. This explains the emergence of the DevOps profile - the search for a person who knows how to develop automation that reduces deployment time while improving interactions between teams. Engineers with a DevOps mindset are pivotal in managing new-generation infrastructures in an ecosystem rich with diverse approaches (CaaS, PaaS, CMP, CI/CD, FaaS, SaaS, IaaS in public Cloud mode, private Cloud, hybrid Cloud, hyper-converged, etc). 

As well as optimal new-tech experience, DevOps candidates need to be able to identify areas for improvement (feature requests and bug fixes) and help resolve an increasing number of tickets, all the while adhering to best practice, as well as evangelizing the infrastructures and topic.

The problem? Organizations just can’t find enough candidates with this particular profile. So, what strategies can be implemented to address this DevOps profile shortage? How do we increase candidates’ skill levels in this topic? What technical level should we be expecting from a candidate? How do we gain interest from IT teams on this subject? These are all questions that Cycloid seeks to clarify and ease.

Tooling: a very dense ecosystem

The DevOps ecosystem is expanding exponentially. Surveys have been carried out, counting an average of 28 tools per company, each tool bringing its own ecosystem that needs to be navigated. This technological frenzy generates lots of strategic questions. Which tools are worth using? Should we expect each team member to become an expert in each of the technologies? How do we ensure interoperability between tools? How do we ensure we have complete reversibility? How can we promise a satisfying and efficient user experience?

The answer: an end-to-end DevOps framework

This is the environment that created Cycloid. It aims to help businesses simplify their DevOps and Cloud adoption by offering a framework that will help you streamline, optimize, and organize the people, processes, and tools you use for business. We believe that every organization needs DevOps. The goal is to enable each and every one to control their own IT, data, and automation, and scale it all to enterprise level. 

We want to simplify access to technologies and clouds, enabling everyone to be able to contribute to a project, regardless of their skillset. To do this without conflict, some users will need flexibility and others will crave governance - Cycloid accommodates both. We aim to ease the DevOps journey by making interactions between teams and automation more fluid (and keeping it that way - there's no lock in). Finally, Cycloid is deeply in favor of open source: we demonstrate our belief by contributing to community developments, natively embedding open-source solutions, and developing some ourselves. 

Cycloid brings many benefits: automate where possible, make sure everything’s reproducible (which allows more time to focus on tasks that need your attention), centralize workflows to save time, increase autonomy, and ensure best practice is always respected. It can't guarantee the rollout of DevOps processes in your company, but it sure can help ease the way.