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Tag: DevOps benefits

  • What You’re Getting Wrong About DevOps (and How To Make it Right)

    What You’re Getting Wrong About DevOps (and How To Make it Right)

    DevOps is now the top software deployment strategy by a mile — 77% of organizations say they use the approach to roll out new software. This is good news because a DevOps approach is an important marker of business maturity, and its benefits (more on that later) are so tangible that most organizations don’t need to be convinced that DevOps is the future. 

    The bad news is most organizations are getting DevOps wrong, which is probably why only 10% report that their organization is “very successful” at achieving rapid software development and deployment. My company started its DevOps journey in 2019 as we began to build out the next generation of our ERP software. We were committed to the strategy but made mistakes along the way. 

    Our experience taught me the typical approach to DevOps (the one we took at first and the one many organizations follow now) is an improvement, but that a mindset shift can truly unlock the DevOps strategy’s potential and enable companies to maximize benefits. Here’s a closer look at where companies can go wrong—and what they stand to gain when they get it right. 

    What Happens When Organizations Get DevOps Wrong

    At its core, the DevOps concept is simple: Operational considerations should be considered at the development stage. As SaaS solutions gained popularity, the idea that issues like downtime should be everyone’s problem gained currency. Many organizations interpreted this to mean there should be a DevOps team that acts as a bridge between the development and operations teams.

    It actually makes more sense to merge the teams entirely. If a DevOps team sits in the center, the silos on the development and operations sides still exist. There can be even more communication breakdowns if there are three teams instead of two, and user needs can still be overlooked. A merged operation addresses this by creating a “you build it, you run it” mindset, which eliminates the disconnect. 

    We’ve found that a merged DevOps group handles operational issues as part of the engineering process from the earliest stages. This approach simplifies the process of identifying and addressing operational issues so that the software is more resilient and does a better job of meeting user expectations. 

    What Happens When Companies Get DevOps Right

    Simply put, making this mindset shift to get DevOps right lets your organization build better products, expedite updates, create greater alignment between teams and execute tasks more efficiently. This improves the experience for everyone, including the organization, its customers and end users. 

    One of the key benefits is better uptime. If you incorporate operational elements from the beginning, you reduce the risk of failure. When the groups are separated, operations teams often find it difficult to pinpoint issues, and the larger the system, the longer it can take to locate the problem, which can result in unhappy customers and unacceptably long outages. 

    By merging engineering and operations, you eliminate the tendency of some engineers to regard operations as someone else’s problem. A DevOps strategy that merges the teams makes operations everyone’s problem. And when everyone is subject to late-night calls for help if a problem occurs, it brings home the need to be proactive about preventing issues in the first place. The result is greater stability and reliability—and happier customers. 

    Maximizing DevOps Benefits

    Our experience taught us that merging engineering and operations was the best way to maximize DevOps benefits. It was a mindset shift that didn’t occur immediately; once it did, we realized how powerful it could be. One key component of the shift is to enhance team effectiveness by hiring engineers who are operations experts and honing existing staff skills as necessary. 

    Another important element is to get software engineers on board with the new approach and make it clear that the change is a priority. It’s easier to coast along as if the present approach is working perfectly, but that prevents your DevOps strategy from reaching its full potential. If you prioritize change and acknowledge the challenges involved, you can overcome them and reap the full benefits. 

    The consensus is clear: DevOps is the logical next step toward business maturity. But how you implement your DevOps strategy determines the magnitude of the improvement. Merging your engineering and operations teams is a challenge, but the reward is better products, quicker updates, tighter team alignment and an improved experience across the board. Getting DevOps right is worth it. 

  • DevOps: Driving Innovation With Old Habits

    DevOps: Driving Innovation With Old Habits

    DevOps can help drive cost-efficiency, greater productivity and innovation

    When software development and IT operations merge and work in a state of harmony, they create a flow that we call continuous product delivery. Ideal for project managers, this flow is the elixir to innovation and enables the agility needed to respond to changing market requirements. It also creates currents of speed, proactiveness and integration within enterprises. However, asynchronous code updates, inadequate IT infrastructure, siloed functioning and inefficient processes can hinder this flow.

    In 2009, Patrick Debois and Andrew Clay Shafer devised a framework to break such barriers and coined it “DevOps.” Over the last decade, DevOps has garnered many followers and fans, including myself. Product managers worldwide rely on DevOps to enhance performance, accelerate time to market and innovate with agility. DevOps is more critical today than ever before—when nature mandates a new order of remote working, product managers must rely on DevOps to catalyze innovation and sustain continuous product deployments and updates.

    Yet, not all enterprises that have adopted DevOps have unearthed innovation like that of Dyson, which created a new type of ventilator in a mere 10 days to help the UK government scale COVID-19 treatments. Nor have they been able to match the frontrunners of innovation such as Google and Amazon that can deploy code thousands of times per day, compared to low performers that deploy code only about four times per day. The obvious question on everyone’s mind is, “What are these heroic innovators doing differently with DevOps?”

    Driving Success Through DevOps

    While business executives are aware that implementing DevOps drives business innovation, most are not aware of the old habits that remain, causing unnecessary hiccups within the application cycle and business transformation. As the way forward, organizations must tweak their approach to DevOps to be able to reap more significant benefits of business innovation. They must:

    Ensure speed does not outpace stability

    Today’s digital-first world has swept through every enterprise. However, to keep up with the rapid dynamics of the digital tide, enterprises need to weed out monolithic architectures and manual processes to turbocharge software development and deployment. Automating the deployment process with the help of microservices and cloud can help enterprises gain speed in software deployments and swim the tide of customer experiences. Speaking from experience, this is a privilege that has allowed me to witness how DevOps practices have enabled enterprises to crunch deployment times from weeks and days to just a few minutes. Needless to say, innovation depends on speed: The faster an enterprise deploys a novel solution, the higher its chance to claim the prize of innovation.

    A word of caution here: Many enterprises that have neglected quality and stability while accelerating speed drown in a vortex of defects often. When pushing out a product or an application 30 times faster than the traditional model, enterprises must consider its stability, too. Cloud infrastructure plays a vital role in helping enterprises achieve both stability and speed. On-demand self-service, networks that cater to multiple devices, high scalability and analytics are some of the primary advantages that enable enterprises to deploy faster without impacting the core.

    Losing stability for the sake of speed can cause organizations to regress instead of leaping forward. In recent times, British Airways has been in the news for repeated issues in its IT infrastructure’s stability. It has had to cancel several flights and inconvenience passengers because software upgrades and incidents have caused its infrastructure to fail. Enterprises must consider these four metrics—lead time for changes, deployment frequency, time to restore service and change failure rate—to receive the value of their DevOps investment.

    Make security equal to agility

    The pandemic-driven remote working has seen the video communication solutions provider Zoom soar to 300 million active monthly users last month. The brand showed great agility in meeting the surge in demand but became vulnerable to cyberattacks—500,000 Zoom passwords were available for sale in the dark web’s crime forums last month. This is an excellent example of how security is usually an afterthought when compared to agility; not prioritizing security in the DevOps cycle can place teams and their organizations at significant risk, creating vulnerabilities and exposing organizations to bad actors.

    In my experience, putting security checks in place early in the DevOps process can help enterprises shift left more effectively. As a first step, security and development teams need to communicate better through the continuous delivery flow. Security teams need to play more proactive roles in foreseeing risks in innovative solutions and routine software updates. Leaving security for the last will only force organizations to be reactive versus proactive.

    Build collaboration, not silos

    Gartner predicts that through 2022, 75% of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations due to issues around organizational learning and change. DevOps is a process that provides tools but it is also a philosophy that promotes collaboration among teams in software development. It catalyzes an ecosystem that encourages high collaboration and information-sharing. In a DevOps culture, failure is not shot down but leads to inquiry that drives solutions. Seamless information flow is the critical outcome of a DevOps-driven organization. Proper information flow is timely, answers questions and is understandable while needing the support of tools and technologies to drive success.

    The General Motors Freemont Assembly line has been a great case study of how poor workforce culture can cause an enterprise to shut down. As one of the largest automobile factories in the United States, the manufacturer had to shut shop in 1982 due to rising losses attributed to an unruly workforce that was protected by a strong union. Within the next two years, the same factory was re-opened in collaboration with Toyota Motors, and it was called NUMMI.

    NUMMI hired up to 85% of the old workforce of GM’s Freemont assembly. The difference was the Toyota culture–one that focused on learning and improvement and set a framework of how leadership interacted with and inspired teams. This change was fundamental in driving success for NUMMI, which reduced the time to manufacture a car to 20.8 hours in 1986—a drastic improvement over 43.1 hours in 1978.

    At a time when we are witnessing unprecedented disruptions to supply chains, manufacturing and employment, enterprises need to deep dive into functioning to explore new opportunities for cost-efficiency, greater productivity and innovation. DevOps can help achieve these and build the foundations for continuous innovation. Investments in automation, cloud and culture will help enterprises realize the continuous flow of product delivery and innovation. The wave of innovation in the new normal will be propelled by the forces of time-tested practices and new next-generation approaches to enable enterprises to shift-left.

  • There is No Magic Recipe to Adopting DevOps

    There is No Magic Recipe to Adopting DevOps

    Over the past five years, we have seen more and more organizations of every size trying to adopt DevOps practices. However, we’re still expecting adoption rates to continue to rise—we have not yet reached “peak DevOps.” The motivations behind this comes from the need to reduce time to market, deliver better quality software, reduce operational costs and, ultimately, improve productivity and stay competitive.

    More enterprises are changing their business models by digitizing their business processes. We’re also seeing increased adoption of cloud technologies, agile frameworks and disruptive technologies. But these factors will not lead to an accelerated software development life cycle if organizations don’t prioritize better collaboration between people (no matter what area they belong to).

    Successfully implementing DevOps practices is not easy. Depending on the company’s size, it can take several months or even years. Most of these enterprises are learning what it takes to transform their organization. From our experience it takes several elements, but most importantly, engaged leadership is one of the most essential aspects for successful DevOps transformations. This leadership support will help organizations create dynamic and flexible business processes that eliminate traditional silos. This means that multiple teams can work together in a collaborative way, making seamless workflows that accelerate the software development life cycle and improve ongoing product maintenance. Such workflows bring tangible benefits, such as being able to rapidly respond to changing customer demands and developing better quality software, faster.

    Implementing DevOps is Unique to Every Company

    However, when talking about what it takes to adopt DevOps, we have to understand that there is no magic recipe that works for all. Every company has its own unique history, culture, and way of working, and thus will implement it differently. This is particularly the case because DevOps is really an amalgamation of different factors, from technology and automation to creating lean work processes and creating a culture of sharing between teams and individuals that traditionally were siloed.

    In 2019, Organizations Will Look to Scaling Initial Initiatives

    Very similar to what we have seen with the adoption of Agile development, most organizations have experimented with DevOps or have launched a small-scale pilot. They are aware of DevOps and the benefits it can bring. The challenge going into 2019, for the vast majority of businesses, is how to scale these pilots enterprise-wide. For example, in its 2017 survey, Forrester Research found that while just 13 percent of organizations had fully implemented DevOps, 50 percent had started their implementation and were expanding their use.

    We’re very much still on the journey to implementing DevOps practices. For example, many of the organizations that we work with are now using automation tools to get closer to continuous integration and continuous delivery capabilities, but there is still potential to use automation to a greater extent.

    There also exists a split in the types of applications that organizations are currently using DevOps for. Again, an interesting study by Forrester Research showed that in 2017, while 68 percent of organizations stated they were already using such practices for building and deploying mobile applications, this percentage dropped to 56 percent for ecommerce websites. I also believe that organizations need to improve how they measure DevOps success: Can they create metrics, such as level of level of innovation, or tie success directly to product revenue or process efficiency?

    As we look forward to 2019, more than ever business leaders will find value in looking at the best practices that companies have already developed on their DevOps journey. But we can’t forget that while two organizations may use the same automation tool, they will have very different cultures and way of working, with different goals and objectives. That’s why DevOps takes so long to implement, and represents a fundamental shift in how most organizations create, deliver and maintain software.

    — Gabriel Vasquez

  • Embracing DevOps into Your Company

    Embracing DevOps into Your Company

    Some companies are embarking on a new adventure in DevOps. As organizations start to consider the possibilities of implementing DevOps, they need to think about what problems it solves and what role it will play in their organization.

    Company Culture and DevOps

    DevOps is both a cultural and technological shift in the enterprise, offering a seamless path from idea to production. Because it involves development, operations, IT and the rest of the business, many organizations have seen the collapsing of their organizational silos.

    Company culture and values are central to DevOps adoption, with leadership encouraging more collaboration. As roles and responsibilities shift, worries over how these changes may impact jobs could result in some internal friction from employees. Throughout this process, communicating ongoing and upcoming changes is critical to keeping employees motivated. Thus, DevOps adoption will be easier if an organization with an open communication style and a philosophy of experimentation with new technologies.

    Security in DevOps

    Security benefits DevOps by reducing the possibility of risks early on, bringing greater agility to the development process. Given the average cost of a security breach—ranging between $2.2 to 6.9 million so far in 2018—and its impact on customers and brand reputation, having a DevSecOps strategy is critical.

    DevOps approaches emphasize the importance of security with speed. While traditional models made time for manual testing, there is no such time available in DevOps, where continuous deployment is the norm. Teams must integrate testing and resolution of security issues earlier (shifting left) in the development process to prevent bigger issues down the road.

    Tips for Best Cloud Platforms and Orchestration Tools

    Organizations will achieve the best results when they use the cloud and orchestration platforms that best serve their technology requirements. All of the major cloud platforms offer the basics, including compute and storage, as well as more niche and cloud-native solutions. Once you’ve chosen a platform, you’ll want to test and evaluate tooling and workflows.

    Here are some DevOps tools that you might consider:

    Version Control Continuous Integration Infrastructure as Code Continuous Testing Continuous Delivery Configuration Management
    GitHub

    GitLab

    Bitbucket

    		 Jenkins

    Bamboo

    TeamCity

    CircleCI

    Shippable

    Concourse CI

    		 Terraform

    AWS CloudFormation

    		 Selenium

    Cucumber

    Jasmine

    Karma

    Gauntlt

    Serverspec

    		 Spinnaker

    Octopus Deploy

    		 Chef

    Puppet

    Ansible

    SaltStack

     

    You’ll want to cherry pick the right set of tools and then create a cohesive and productive DevOps automation workflow that ultimately increases both the robustness and velocity of your releases. For example, in the following DevOps automation workflow we have chosen GitHub for version control, Bamboo for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), Terraform for infrastructure as code, and Chef for configuration management:

    Recommendations for Getting Started

    We have five recommendations for getting started with DevOps in your organization:

    1. Start with a Process: The only way to understand whether a DevOps process is successful is by getting started. Make good use of the opportunity by engaging teams to work together to build innovation. Be prepared to experiment and fail. Eventually the right process will evolve.
    2. Define the Metrics. For transformation to work, you need to understand the key metrics that matter. Use these metrics as a starting point:
      1. Mean Time to Production: The length of time it takes for newly committed source code to get into production.
      2. Deployment Frequency: How often releases are deployed into production.
      3. Average Lead Time: How long it takes for a new feature to be developed, tested and deployed into production.
      4. Deployment Speed: How long it takes to deploy a new release into production.
      5. Production Failure Rate: The frequency of production failures.
      6. Mean Time to Recover (MTTR): The time required to recover from a failure.
    3. Visualize the Workflow: You won’t really know how effective DevOps will be until you put it into action. By creating a visual model, team members will have a better understanding of how their work impacts the entire DevOps process.
    4. Create Continuous Process: DevOps requires automation, and lots of it. High-velocity robust releasing can only be achieved through the implementation of CI and CD. In CI, members of a team integrate their work frequently to build software faster, while CD offers the opportunity to integrate automated testing into the release process.
    5. Improve Communication: With teams now integrated, the next step is to make sure they can communicate with one another. Start by establishing a unified language between business and engineering teams to express the desired acceptance criteria for both teams.

    As organizations embrace DevOps, culture will be as important as technology in making a successful transition. Make sure that your DevOps playbook addresses how your chosen DevOps tools and technologies will work together with people and processes.

    — Jeremy Cook

  • DevOps: What a Wonderful World it Would Be

    DevOps: What a Wonderful World it Would Be

    The promises of DevOps are clear. They offer faster iterations, allowing ops to keep up with agile development and make an IT organization more responsive to business needs.

    DevOps doesn’t make less code. It doesn’t reduce configuration files. It doesn’t eliminate deployment issues (though it might reduce them). It doesn’t eliminate testing; indeed, it creates more if Agile and DevOps are taken to their logical conclusion:  More testing, earlier. DevOps doesn’t reduce the need for security.

    In short, it doesn’t reduce workloads. It might automate some of them, freeing up man-hours, which is absolutely a positive result—one of the more positive results, in my opinion. But it also introduces the overhead of the DevOps toolchain, so some of that automated freed-up time is already spoken for.

    And automation of testing (for example) is something that’s been around for decades. The first UI-based automated testing system I recall was Microsoft Test. I managed a team that used it extensively to automate test runs of the software we delivered to financial services. It worked well, and there was much gnashing of teeth when Microsoft discontinued the product.

    The same is true of most of the time-saving benefits of DevOps: We’ve tried them before, but DevOps approaches them from a different perspective—and, in many cases, a more sustainable perspective.

    I’m a DevOps aficionado, make no mistake. The reason I’m stressing what it won’t do here is because misperceptions drag it down. Don’t go into it looking to reduce costs, because at least in the short run you won’t. Don’t go into it looking to save work, because at least in the short term those savings will be minimal. Going into it for the wrong reasons means the things you are measuring will ultimately look like failures, even if all the good DevOps offers is reaped.

    Instead, go into it looking to be more responsive. Go into it looking to beat your competition to market. Go into it looking to increase communications across the team. Delve into DevOps for the right reasons, and you’ll be measuring the right outputs.

    And remember, it is an iterative process. Don’t overstate expected benefits on the first pass. Low-hanging fruit makes it look as if DevOps will do a lot of things, but low-hanging fruit often has tight ties into firmly rooted trees, making it harder to grab than originally thought. Use a measured approach and look for consistent improvements. In some organizations those improvements might be small at first. But use your knowledge of the organization and application portfolio to create a measured success plan.

    Reaping the benefits is worth the change DevOps brings. The ability to tell a line-of-business leader that the new functionality they are considering could be mocked up and ready for review in a week or two is a huge benefit to the organization. And it doesn’t hurt at all that such responsiveness will raise the rest of the organization’s opinion of IT.

    So it is a wonderful world, if your goals are the right ones.

    — Don Macvittie

  • 15 Things Your Competitors Know About DevOps

    15 Things Your Competitors Know About DevOps

    It’s no secret that DevOps is revolutionizing IT, helping organizations do more, faster. DevOps success is now essential for organizations in their quest to remain competitive. According to the “2015 State of DevOps Report” by Puppet, organizations utilizing DevOps deploy software 30 times more frequently and have lead times that are 200 times shorter. Plus, their failures are limited to 60 times while recovery is 168 times faster.

    Here are the 15 things your DevOps-enabled competitors know that you might not be aware of:

    Easier Code Evaluations

    Code evaluations have become easier than ever. Developers now can move on to tasks and get rid of frequent changes in the code. Successful enterprises quickly react to the changes within the system with ultimate results. This enables greater benefit for the end-user applications.

    Quality Software

    DevOps training is all about transforming the way businesses think about software.

    DevOps elements are meant to be employed in individual teams or projects. But, the real success of the organization lies in the support from the whole. Successful organizations change the way its IT operates, supports and leads the enterprise.

    Different Definition

    Successful DevOps adoption is different for different organizations. Whether it is continuous delivery, quality or speed, every enterprise defines DevOps differently. It depends on you how you define DevOps that meets your enterprise necessities in a clear and consistent tone. Focus more on the results than the methods.

    Continuous Delivery – Streamlining development and avoiding the hurdles to achieve efficient functionality.

    Release Speed – Effectively meeting the expectations of consumers.

    DevOps is Beyond IT

    DevOps has consistently evolved beyond the typical IT concept. It involves software, applications and tech-based services. It brings together the responsibilities of everyone in the company, and not just IT.

    This way the whole enterprise collaborates more closely on a defined DevOps platform. Complexities are effectively eliminated due to fewer barriers between IT Operations and Development teams.

    Transforming the IT Culture

    Transition to a DevOps operating model mainly depends on tools and principles. However, DevOps is all about changing the enterprise IT culture rather than just tools and processes.

    DevOps culture is all about removing the barriers and getting the whole team at one place, which further, improves the work efficiency. It is necessary that everyone—within and outside IT—must understand the importance and competitive advantages of a business to become more agile.

    Digital Transformation

    Digital Transformation is in high demand in recent years. Its foundation lies in applications that constantly create new channels that encourage customers and keep employees productive. DevOps is critical for the success of application strategy and forms an important element of digital transformation.

    Holistic Approach Toward Metrics

    Metrics are the parameters that guide any kind of organization. Your DevOps-enabled competitors are successful because they effectively measure the metrics and change them accordingly to improve growth in the industry.

    The right metrics make sure that DevOps transformation is working. Make a full-dimensional approach of metrics including:

    • Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR)
    • Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)
    • Process and People Metrics
    • Active Users
    • Development-to-Deployment Lead Time

    Incorporating Automation

    Agility plays an important role in all processes of the DevOps operating model. To make the process more agile, it is essential to employ automation for repetitive tasks. This maintains the workflow of the whole process.

    Automation has expanded to all stages, including, development, testing, production and operation teams. The kinds of automation are:

    • Release Automation – Using tools such as Chef and Puppet.
    • Runbook Automation – Application performance management and monitoring solutions.
    • Automation achieves desired quality goals by maintaining compliance. It reduces costs and delivers a faster response.

    Feedback and Feedforward Cycles

    DevOps promotes agility through healthier integration within the organization. Feed forward and Feed backward in the development life cycle is critical in determining this agility.

    Different functions of the company interact smoothly only when tools lay their focus on software development process. This provides information on the content that is relevant to each audience. Context relevance enables easy creation of dashboards and present this information to the audience in a way which makes sense.

    Real-time Approach to APM

    DevOps is more about culture than just tools. Right tools and right actions highly improve odds of success and evade negative impact.

    Solutions you choose must provide visibility into future problems. Software development and implementation must be maintained in a volatile, fast-paced environment that requires production-ready APM solutions. Your competitors are highly efficient because they are aware of the trick: monitoring applications down to specific functions. Working together ensures quality and makes it easy to predict the success of applications.

    Application Analytics Improve Software Strategy

    Analytics plays an important role in improving software strategy. Utilizing analytics solutions prior to quality user expectations achieve competency.

    Software is not all about just software; it is about how it connects with customers to generate revenue. Ideal analytics are capable of connecting application performance with user management and business data. Be sure to define the vision and establish organizational priorities within the budget.

    Customer-centric and Innovation Cocused

    DevOps improves the communication between developers and IT Operations by building customer experience. DevOps provide value under pressure to the enterprises. Having DevOps within an organization is a definite necessity. It always upholds the competitive advantage and effectively delivers the software to the customers.

    Study Case Studies

    If you are the one aiming to make bigger by employing DevOps in your organization, read case studies and real-world examples. This effectively manages the DevOps transition for any size of the enterprise.

    Macro Environment

    Budget, roles and responsibilities and departments have a come a long way. Product releases have been reduced from annually to quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily and now to several times a day. Microbuilds, microreleases, microupdates, microtesting and microcheck-ins have now become an easy task.

    Welcome Ops Movement

    Don’t stop with the existing movements. Go and explore the Ops and its related tools: viz. DevOps, DevSecOps, BizOps, etc.

    Final Thoughts…

    It is clearly evident that investing in DevOps culture is pure benefit. DevOps is here to transform the way organizations develop, monitor and handle the applications and its underlying infrastructure. It has readily progressed from a niche concept to a business imperative. Every enterprise, small and large, aspires to integrate DevOps tools and principles. Employ the above points to successfully drive the DevOps conversation within your enterprise.

    About the Author / Sirisha Paladhi

    Sirisha Paladhi is a content writer at Mindmajix. During her career, she has written many articles on technology innovations. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

     

     

  • Should You Embrace DevOps in Your Business?

    Should You Embrace DevOps in Your Business?

    New to some, old hat to many and a source of ambiguity to more than a few, DevOps is being embraced by the IT world as an answer to increase quality of business processes—to innovate faster and to get new products to market sooner in a defined time frame. There is no doubt DevOps has fundamentally changed the way an IT organization works and how it gets things done.

    But one may argue what, exactly, does it mean? Is it a process? A methodology? A paradigm? A platform? A technology or a culture? DevOps is not a platform or technology, but a practice that requires internal cultural changes where working together is encouraged to reduce complexity and remove the siloed setup while ensuring the stability of service delivery.

    In simpler terms, DevOps is an evolution of agile software development that aims to break down the “wall of confusion” between developers (Dev) and operations (Ops) team to collaborate better so they can deliver frequent changes faster, with higher efficiency and robust quality based on market demands.

    Let’s have a look what Gartner has to say:

    “DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture), and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”

    Once you have a firm grasp of what it is, we can move forward. The critical step is to assess your business environment and processes for DevOps compatibility. The assessment questions could be:

    • Are you meeting your project timelines?
    • Are your build, deploy and test processes automated?
    • Is your development and delivery cost rapidly increasing?
    • Do you need more stable operating environments?
    • Do you want to improve customer satisfaction through frequent and timely updates, immediate feedback loops and continuous improvement?
    • Are you ready to break down the traditional silos across teams and ready to go faster?

    If you’ve answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you may want to consider DevOps as a service for your enterprise. But before you consider it, the critical first step is to research your consulting partner. Look for a partner that has a long-term vision and a clear, tightly integrated road map to help your business realize the true benefits of DevOps. So whatever your drivers are for undertaking the initiative, your partner should have the requisite skills and experience to guide you on your journey. Alongside, your partner should offer you a complete range of services. From initial discussions through to delivery and ongoing support.

    There’s a lot to be said for DevOps. In a business climate that’s all about speed, quality and delivery, it’s critical that enterprises understand the power of DevOps. It is not a fringe movement; it has now become a key part of enterprise IT planning to stay relevant in the marketplace.

    About the Author / Ritesh Gujrati

    RiteshRitesh Gujrati is digital marketer at OSSCube, a global solution provider. He frequently talks about disruptive technologies like DevOps, digital transformation, big data, IT modernization, IoT and cloud. He is well-versed with web analytics tools, paid media marketing and has hands-on experience on organic promotion and content marketing. Feel free to contact Ritesh through ritesh.gujrati@osscube.com.