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Why software team performance matters more than ever
It’s a cliche to say that every business today is a software business — but it’s kinda true. And if your company’s software is the key to your competitive edge, you need to figure out how to create high-performing software teams that can deliver innovative, customer-focused outcomes faster than your rivals.
The software industry has great intelligence on how to create high-performing teams, and exactly how much impact they deliver in dimensions such as profitability, productivity, and market share.
A good place to start is the research in the 2017 book Accelerate, and the annual State of DevOps report that followed it, published by Google and DORA.
This original research yielded statistical insights into the correlation between key software delivery capabilities and organizational performance outcomes. High performers have:
- 46x more frequent code deployments
- 440x faster lead time from commit to deploy
- 170x faster mean time to recover (MTTR) from downtime
- 5x lower change failure rate
Each year the DORA report uncovers new insights associated with high-performing teams. The most recent spotlights how high performers leverage flexible infrastructure enabled by the cloud, resulting in 30% higher organizational performance.
But what actually is flexible infrastructure?
Flexible infrastructure to the rescue
Flexible infrastructure doesn’t mean simply using cloud in the same (inflexible) way you may have used traditional infrastructure. It comes from qualities like:
- On-demand service
- Resource pooling
- Elasticity
- Broad network access
- Measured service
In this year’s report, the researchers wanted to see if the use of cloud based services resulted in more flexible infrastructure as defined above. They found that using a public cloud leads to a 22% increase in infrastructure flexibility relative to not using the cloud.
More significantly, they found that organizations truly capitalizing on that flexibility perform substantially better on measures of organizational performance, team performance, software delivery performance, and operational performance than those who simply use the cloud by just shifting the workload.
You may have heard stories like this before: simply lifting-and-shifting from a traditional data center to public cloud computing is just doing the same things in a different place. Your teams won’t see any real benefit, and the additional cognitive load from operating in a new environment actually makes the situation even worse.
To realize the benefit, you need to use the cloud flexibly, and rethink how you build and deliver your applications.
Businesses continue to choose Kubernetes to enable flexibility
This is where our own research at Spectro Cloud, in our 2024 State of Production Kubernetes report, comes in. Organizations are continuing to move toward the cloud-native Kubernetes ecosystem to get the infrastructure flexibility that DORA describes.
For example, Kubernetes gives you:
- On-demand service with self-service ‘KaaS’ platforms and virtual clusters. Arguably, the whole concept of platform engineering and minimizing developer friction fits in here!
- Resource pooling, with the ability to deploy containers among multiple environments, including on-prem, using CAPI.
- Rapid elasticity, which you can learn more about in our blog, Kubernetes autoscaling patterns: HPA, VPA and KEDA - Spectro Cloud.
- Broad network access with ingress controllers and Gateway API.
- Measured service, with advanced observability and cost management tooling.
But if it were only so easy to build all this out and make it real.
With flexibility comes complexity
The Kubernetes ecosystem provides all of the aforementioned solutions to enable flexibility. That’s its whole reason for being.
But the power and sophistication of the ecosystem also brings complexity, and a learning curve for application devs.
What’s worse, the steep learning curve introduces knock-on effects: configuration drift leading to ‘snowflake’ inconsistencies that compromise app availability; lack of isolation; and anti-patterns that lead to overprovisioning.
If you’ve used Kubernetes in the enterprise, this won’t be news to you. And the truth is that complexity has plagued Kubernetes for the past decade, significantly inhibiting adoption.
We engineered Palette to solve this conundrum, giving you the infrastructure flexibility that Kubernetes promises, without the challenge of complexity.
Palette simplifies Kubernetes to give you the flexibility you need
Palette makes cloud-native application design, built upon the rich Kubernetes ecosystem, easier to leverage. How?
Let's break it down by taking a look at some of the common tasks that kill flexibility and drag software engineers, devops engineers, and other team members away from building and delivering software products.
First, building a new cluster, whether for dev or for testing at the end of a software delivery pipeline. With Palette, it’s easy and even self-service to stand up a cluster in minutes, using pre-defined templates (which we call Cluster Profiles). These ensure that the cluster configuration is correct across the full stack, from the infrastructure layers all the way up to the app. The developer has repeatability among multiple clusters, if needed, ensuring consistency and eliminating configuration drift.
Next, day-to-day operations. Tasks like observability, backups, and security scans can soak hours and slow time to market. So we baked these features into Palette so they’re ready out of the box. Even typically challenging tasks, like patching and upgrades of Kubernetes and other infrastructure layers, are covered, meaning that you'll stay up-to-date and ahead of vulnerabilities.
A Kubernetes management plane, like Palette, enables platform teams to be more effective in their mission of providing a common platform for developers to use across the organization. Enterprise-grade functionality, such as RBAC (role-based access control), is purpose built for large organizations who are charged with enabling their developers to spend more time focusing on their apps, helping them integrate their solutions, and generating better customer experience.
The usability that Palette brings to Kubernetes allows you to capitalize on the flexibility that Kubernetes brings to the cloud. So rather than just using a cloud, you’ll be able to embrace the cloud in a flexible way, realizing cloud benefits like the most successful DORA respondents. You can be among the highest performing application development teams in the industry
Palette can take you even further
But what if you wanted to outpace even the highest performers outlined in the DORA report?
If you’ve got the ambition, Palette can help you take the next step — with new kinds of flexibility not documented in the DORA research. For example to:
- Take advantage of different computing environments — public multicloud, private cloud, on-prem, bare metal, and edge — in a unified way
- Modernize workloads from VMs to containers at your own pace
- Optimize workloads for better user experience, for example to locate it closer to users for lower latency or leverage GPUs for AI workloads
- Improve risk management by avoiding lock-in to a particular cloud or software component
In our own research we’ve discovered that our customers are leveraging this additional flexibility offered by Palette to ratchet-up what it means to be a high-performing team.
Our customers are taking the next step beyond simply using a cloud flexibly, as DORA has measured, to enabling continuous delivery across multiple deployment targets. They are putting their cloud investment on steroids, to get the extra edge against competition. As more organizations adopt this path, the time will come when, in order to be competitive, you no longer have the choice.
If you’d like to see for yourself how Palette can help support flexible infrastructure and enable your application teams, get in touch for a demo and we’ll give you free access to try it out.
