DORA Metrics for DevOps: How to Go Beyond Measurement and Ensure Compliance

DORA metrics, which include deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery, are essential for assessing DevOps performance but are often hindered by the complexities of cloud-native environments. Organizations struggle to improve these metrics systematically due to infrastructure challenges such as manual changes, configuration drift, lack of visibility, and undocumented dependencies. The solution lies in achieving real infrastructure-as-code (IaC) coverage, enabling self-service infrastructure with guardrails, automating drift detection and remediation, and establishing a single source of truth for infrastructure. Platform engineering plays a pivotal role in enhancing DORA metrics by abstracting infrastructure complexity and facilitating systematic improvements, ultimately leading to increased efficiency and reliability without relying on manual processes.