Tech conglomerates around the globe have experimented and explored various methodologies and techniques for many years in an attempt to integrate DevOps into their ecosystems, with mixed success; while some initiatives failed, others succeeded at setting up DevOps foundations.
Implementation can be difficult and might slow down initiatives meant to leverage this ecosystem.
DevOps is an agile development approach focused on reliability and availability that is adopted and deployed within large firms, often as an enterprise-level deployment project.
However, adopting and deploying DevOps may pose its own unique set of difficulties that must be navigated carefully for best results.
Even with best efforts, even promising digital products and services often fall short in reaching widespread adoption due to different tactics and challenges at each step.
You must devise a comprehensive DevOps strategy in order to make DevOps work in your favor.
This article presents an examination of the challenges and strategies associated with adopting and implementing DevOps.
What is DevOps?
DevOps was coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois as a combination of operations and development.
DevOps does not refer to an application, framework, or technology; rather it refers to a collection of processes which help create an environment in which development teams and operations teams can work more collaboratively together on business projects.
DevOps works by eliminating communication barriers while encouraging teamwork.
DevOps can increase the efficiency of an enterprise software delivery ecosystem by improving collaboration and automating software development processes.
DevOps success can never happen overnight; rather it should be considered more of an ongoing journey. Todays organizations strive to enhance the quality of their IT; DevOps implementation plays a pivotal role in meeting this objective.
Seven Steps For Successful Devops Adoption
DevOps has been around for more than 10 years, yet many firms still havent adopted it fully or achieved desired results from using DevOps.
Here are a few steps that should help facilitate its successful adoption by your firm.
Adopting A Devops Mentality
Lets introduce DevOps into our organization! But that doesnt suffice: DevOps requires everyone in your organization to embrace change and understand exactly what DevOps can provide for business needs that could benefit from its implementation.
DevOps and automation can often be misconstrued within organizations. DevOps should not simply be seen as automating manual tasks - rather, it involves communication and collaboration as well.
Automation wont produce its intended business benefits unless all parties involved with DevOps software development, testing, and operations employ excellent collaboration practices that foster open lines of communication among them all.
DevOps can be successfully implemented by ensuring all those involved in its delivery process possess more flexibility and an innovative mindset.
DevOps will become embedded within an organization only if all those involved understand their responsibilities and duties in relation to its implementation.
Furthermore, for it to succeed it requires leadership who have faith in this initiative as well as individuals that support creating an DevOps-style culture within an organization.
Recognize The Infrastructure You Require
DevOps is not a one-size-fits-all approach; thus you cannot expect success by hiring just any "DevOps Engineer" or adding any one online tool.
DevOps will take on different forms within each organization depending on its business requirements, DevOps culture and infrastructure.
Understanding your applications specifications is paramount to successfully aligning DevOps with infrastructure architecture goals as well as business goals.
Examine your project delivery cycle, testing environments and bottlenecks to pinpoint potential areas for improvement.
DevOps will only succeed with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deliver (CI/CD pipelines) implemented into your workflow.
Why? Well, heres why...
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Create A Devops Strategy
Program managers need to establish a common objective to unify teams. By giving members something concrete to aim toward, each will feel greater accountability.
DevOps relies heavily on best practices that foster innovative approaches in software development, testing, architecture design and teamwork enhancement while encouraging new approaches in these areas.
Your strategy must have two primary focuses: supporting the work of your team as effectively as possible and expediting production-ready processes deployment.
Devops Tools: Choose The Right One
DevOps is not a one-size-fits-all solution; rather, organizations should carefully select tools that align with their software delivery environment, applications and teams for maximum benefit.
Tools designed specifically to create and facilitate DevOps Frameworks can assist organizations in optimizing resources and costs, efficiently carrying out processes and meeting organizational goals.
Organizations need to keep several factors in mind when selecting DevOps software:
- Automating at the enterprise level is essential.
It will help in scaling the business outcome workflows without adding additional effort.
- DevOps requires the integration of the entire delivery ecosystem. The tools you choose should be able to integrate.
Automate Your Testing And Align Qa To Development
DevOps relies heavily on automated testing in order to accelerate delivery, however not all types of tests need be automated; manual testing remains necessary for specific kinds of assessments such as security or usability tests; functional tests may only partially automated depending on how much writing needs to occur before automation can take effect.
To prevent bugs from emerging upon release, development and testing should occur simultaneously. Automated tests should be run 1-2 times each day while creating the program so developers can address any problems found before deploying new builds.
Application Containerization
Application containerization, an emerging technology, is revolutionizing how cloud-based apps are tested and run.
Containerizing programs makes them lightweight and easier for cloud servers to run them smoothly.
Containerized software increases reliability by isolating it from larger infrastructure components; as a result, software now runs independently in any environment and DevOps can quickly manage and adjust microservices by containerizing.
Focus On Iterative Adopt
Start small when embarking upon DevOps implementation within your enterprise. Choose a pilot app, form a cross-functional team composed of developers, testers and operations personnel and evaluate value streams for bottlenecks or limitations before creating an initial deployment pipeline taking into account process constraints.
Reiterate. To build trust in your framework and pilot, multiple iterations are required before expanding on it.
As it will have the biggest commercial ramifications, focus on your most significant value-stream limitations first.
Some might be quick and simple fixes; others could require longer.
Devops In Outsourced Software Development
DevOps has revolutionized how we view software development.
DevOps encourages developers and operations staff to work closely together in order to accelerate the release of software products faster.
It emphasizes rapid feedback loops and automated testing methods in order to catch any bugs before they get released into production environments.
DevOps can help reduce development times while simultaneously increasing quality code. By employing automation tools such as Puppet or Chef, DevOps aims at producing applications faster with minimal errors.
DevOps provides many advantages, yet can sometimes be hard to implement successfully. DevOps should be pursued for three key reasons.
Rapid Delivery With Agility
DevOps can help your organization increase agility and efficiency of proactive and reactive responses in an unpredictable business environment, where success and failure could depend on small upgrades released several weeks beforehand.
DevOps provides the ideal way to enhance this agility.
DevOps is becoming an essential aspect of modern business operations. DevOps, adaptive IT and agility are proven strategies, but only DevOps truly provides business leaders with a competitive edge.
When the future remains unknown its critical that infrastructure can quickly adapt to changes as quickly as possible to remain agile enough for whatever comes our way.
Breaking Down The Silos
DevOps also helps break down IT silos. IT teams typically consist of professionals certified across at least five disciplines such as Windows, Linux/Unix storage networking databases or security - this eliminates barriers between teams such as development testing operations.
DevOps is an evolving approach to development and deployment that offers greater flexibility and responsiveness to market changes.
DevOps introduces more dynamic approaches in both development and deployment for increased flexibility in meeting changing market requirements.
Enabling Business
DevOps represents a paradigm shift for IT supply chains, offering faster innovation at reduced costs with enhanced collaboration and faster development cycles.
Automating tools, collaboration platforms and processes is enhanced for better efficiency transforming IT from being just an expense center into becoming strategic partners in innovation and productivity.
IT velocity can be seen as the new currency - its velocity being defined as "speed in direction". According to research, enterprises that implement DevOps are twice more likely to meet or surpass profit and market share targets than those that dont use this approach; these businesses were moving quickly yet in the right direction.
Read More: How to Foster a Successful DevOps Culture: A Step by Step Guide
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is revolutionizing business operations across industries. Technological innovations drive this transformational trend; its purpose being to boost employee productivity and enhance the customer experience while improving employee efficiency and satisfaction levels.
At its heart lies software.
DevOps provides fast delivery of top-tier digital services - an essential aspect of successful digital transformation.
Software Stability and High Quality
DevOps is a shared responsibility within an organization where everyone contributes. Each team member plays their part to reach goals of quality, performance, user-experience, security stability and marketing timeframe.
DevOps provides assurances of everything being in control; every change is recorded, and everyone understands its impact on quality.
DevOps not only expedites software delivery faster, but it also enhances quality and stability.
DevOps has long been recognized for its ability to increase stability. Due to frequent releases, DevOps makes issue identification and resolution much faster, leaving more time available for innovation and quality enhancement.
Devops: 8 Best Practices For Implementing It
1. Agile Project Management
Agile project management uses iterative software development. Agile teams utilize agile principles in smaller chunks rather than waiting until release date to complete work; continuously evaluate requirements, plans and results and respond quickly to customer feedback or pivot as necessary.
Collaboration and trustBuilding an environment of shared responsibility and transparency are integral parts of high-performance DevOps groups, according to our survey on 2020 DevOps Trends.
Accordingly, collaboration and problem solving were identified as two of the key attributes necessary for creating an ideal DevOps environment.
DevOps is not always practiced by teams operating in silos. Being mindful of how your actions impact not just your team but all teams involved with a release is the foundation of systems thinking; without shared goals and visibility there will likely be no dependency planning; instead priority alignment issues surface as do finger pointing or "not our problem" statements resulting in reduced velocity and poor quality output from these projects.
DevOps represents an evolution in mentality between developers and operators where both can collaborate to look holistically at the development process as part of collaboration team effort.
Work Smarter And Release Faster
DevOps teams depend on speed for success; DevOps teams produce more deliverables more rapidly while increasing quality and stability of these deliveries.
According to DORA 2019 State of DevOps Report, top performing DevOps teams deployed their services 208x faster and 106 times more frequently than low performing ones.
An inadequate testing and review cycle can delay product releases, while ineffective response to incidents can undermine team trust and velocity.
Diverse tools and processes may increase operating costs as they generate context switches that halt momentum; with automation tools that streamline processes teams can increase productivity more frequently while also releasing software faster with fewer bugs than before.
Accelerate The Time To Resolution
DevOps teams that prioritize rapid feedback will flourish most successfully, helping reduce downtime by adopting full transparency and effective communication methods.
Customer satisfaction will quickly diminish if critical issues are not promptly resolved, while lack of clear communication allows key issues to slip through the cracks, creating tension between teams.
Open dialogue allows development and operations teams to quickly address any issues, identify incidents or unblock release pipelines through open channels of dialogue.
Unplanned Work Can Be Better Managed
Unplanned work often causes productivity losses for teams. Development and operations teams can efficiently handle unplanned tasks by creating processes to prioritize them more effectively.
Transferring and prioritizing unplanned work between teams or systems can be inefficient, taking focus away from what needs to be accomplished.
By increasing visibility and conducting proactive retrospectives, teams can anticipate and share unanticipated tasks more efficiently.
DevOps teams tend to be more productive and efficient, providing better services to clients. Automation and cross-functional cooperation reduce complexity and errors, speeding Mean Time To Recover (MTTR) following incidents or outages.
Open DevOps is a fantastic way to put DevOps into practice; providing all of the tools teams require to build and manage software products efficiently, thanks to integrations from leading vendors and marketplace apps allowing teams to customize their own set of DevOps tools.
Agile project management is based on the following key concepts:
- Start by building your workflow into four distinct phases - To Do, In Progress, Code Review and Done. Discover more about workflows here.
- As teams progress, they will need to divide large projects into manageable tasks in response to changing requirements or scope. Discover how epics, themes and stories can help teams structure and scope work projects effectively.
- How can you effectively track and plan incremental work? Scrum and Kanban are essential frameworks of agile teams.
2. Shift Left with CI/CD
Teams who "shift left" integrate testing early into their development processes, rather than sending multiple changes out for independent QA reviews or fixes to an independent testing or quality assurance department, developers can directly fix bugs and enhance code quality as they work on relevant sections of the codebase.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), deployment processes and processes enable these teams to move left. Learn more about what constitutes continuous deployment (CD).
3. The Right Tools For The Job
DevOps tools must allow developers and operations teams to deliver software faster with higher quality, so learn how to select DevOps Tools that meet these criteria for all phases of DevOps Lifecycle implementation.
4. Implement Automation
Continuous Integration and Delivery allows developers to regularly merge code into the main repository using automated continuous code delivery (CI/CD).
Automated code checking ranges from batching within specific time windows to frequent commits; replacing manual checks. Automated testing accompanies both continuous integration and delivery for successful DevOps environments - automating unit, performance, integration, end-to-end tests among others can make testing an integral component.
5. Monitor The Devops Pipelines And Applications
Monitoring DevOps pipeline is essential to ensure that a failed build or test doesnt delay development efforts. Automation can speed up development but in cases of unknown errors it might be better to complete manual tasks instead.
Monitoring production applications also plays a vital role, helping detect any failures before customers report issues directly.
6. Observability
Monitoring has grown increasingly complex as industry transitioned away from monolithic on-premises systems and applications and toward microservices-based cloud native apps, leading to greater observability as logs, traces and metrics are considered essential building blocks of such an observability strategy.
Logs, traces and metrics often serve as three pillars to maintain this goal of observability. Logs provide time series data about how a system or application is functioning; they show trace information tracing logic flow within applications; while metrics provide metrics on CPU/RAM usage, disk space usage, network connectivity or anything else relevant.
Observing systems using all three sources of information allows one to predict future functioning more reliably and predict success or failure earlier - something impossible otherwise!
7. Get continuous feedback
Team members receive continual feedback to ensure they have all of the information required for timely performance of their duties.
From a development teams standpoint, any pipeline failure will be identified immediately while developers receive clear and thorough results of code testing almost instantly. Likewise, product management receives alerts regarding production failures, performance deficiencies or reported bugs immediately.
Prioritizing quality over speed was widely believed; with DevOps making both possible through continuous feedback loops.
8. Change The Culture
DevOps is a collaborative process which demands transparency, empathy and trust within an organization. If your company already embodies these qualities it should be relatively easy to adopt DevOps; otherwise it must be developed.
Most organizational structures contain silos; this means different teams have their own areas they handle on their own without communicating much between themselves; DevOps only works if these barriers can be broken down through adopting an "you build it and you run it" mentality where communications channels and collaboration remain open - learn more here about creating team culture!
DevOps is an on-going journey. When beginning, focus on people and processes before gradually adding advanced tools, integration features, and feature functionality as you mature your practice.
Enterprise DevOps: Challenges and Solutions
Enterprises need to adapt in order to remain competitive in todays market and adopting new technologies is necessary for survival.
Unfortunately, adoption comes with its share of challenges; however, taking an approach prepared can mitigate them into opportunities if managed strategically - the main challenges organizations encounter when adopting DevOps being one such example.
How To Overcome The "Ops Vs. Dev" Mindset
DevOps implementation presents companies with numerous challenges when seeking to implement this method within IT organizations, especially when trying to unify teams and break down silos within them.
Each organization should establish where development ends and operations begin as well as ways to integrate these two functions effectively.
Microservices Are An Alternative To Traditional Infrastructure
Microservices have become an invaluable way of improving existing apps or replacing obsolete versions, providing faster innovation and development processes.
Furthermore, these modern microservices help businesses manage heavy operational loads more easily.
Too Much Focus On Tools
As part of their DevOps implementation plans, organizations often rely on new and exciting tools that may seem to provide solutions for every possible ailment they face.
As new tools are implemented, employees will require training on their use. You should also ensure they adhere to security standards and integrate seamlessly into existing infrastructure.
Read More: How to Foster a Successful DevOps Culture: A Step by Step Guide
Releases And Deployments Are The Responsibility Of A Team
Businesses implementing DevOps dont hand the responsibility for software release and deployment cycles directly over to teams; DevOps takes over this responsibility from them.
To foster an environment conducive to productive collaboration, dev teams should engage in close partnership with operations personnel on release management, deployments and operations tasks - this will allow developers to better comprehend how operations teams deploy or release works.
How To Handle Resistance To Change
DevOps may seem intimidating to some team members or key stakeholders; one way of mitigating its effect would be by framing its implementation as an upgrade rather than as an abrupt transformation of current development methods.
An alternative strategy might involve transitioning existing products or full stack applications over to DevOps as part of an overall software transformation project plan.
Once they witness how effective these new methods of working can be, teams will quickly embrace these ways of operating.
How Can Developers.Dev Help You To Achieve Your Vision Of Success By Implementing Devops Principles?
DevOps can speed software release while also upholding quality, without cost or compromise in quality or productivity.
DevOps should not be seen as something easily bought off-the-shelf; developers.dev can assist if your organization wishes to switch into this model of development and operations management.
Developers.dev is an innovative provider of DevOps Services that employs best practices in DevOps to assist businesses improve their agility and effectiveness in development operations.
DevOps engineers at our company employ cutting-edge tools and technologies to seamlessly incorporate DevOps into your operation, automate cloud infrastructure management, corporate operations management as well as continuous delivery/integration to accelerate product releases faster.
At IKEA and KFC, our cloud consulting service gives them an edge in their respective industries by providing infrastructure support as well as managed cloud services.
If you require similar assistance, dont hesitate to get in touch with our specialists!
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Wrapping up!
Before embarking on DevOps implementation, consider all the resources, organization work and new technologies required for its successful execution.
DevOps offers several advantages over its alternatives; one notable perk being faster software delivery without compromising its quality.
To achieve these benefits, both changes should be implemented: the software development process and IT infrastructure configuration.
DevOps will never reach completion; there will always be room for improvement. By starting today, however, business goals may become achievable much sooner.
