DevOps provides teams working on cloud products and applications more than merely popular tools; rather it serves to educate teams, individuals and organizations as it eliminates communication bottlenecks while standardizing DevOps environments through robust DevOps automation.
When applied properly it provides engineering teams with numerous direct benefits:
- Faster code build (Continuous Integration) Faster code deployment (Continuous Deployment)
- Faster delivery
- Better product quality
- Reduced time to Market
- Improved productivity
- Collaboration and teamwork: a better way to work together
How Devops Benefit Companies And Enterprises?
DevOps can transform an organization, helping bridge the gap between IT development, operations and business goals.
Agile and Scrum methodologies serve as key DevOps strategies and help companies work directly with engineering teams.
DevOps is enabled by a few key value drivers. Here is a list that explains itself:
- Agility
- Efficiency
- Stability
- Quality
- The default Security of Your Own Home
- Employee Satisfaction
Enterprise level DevOps strategies must center around customer value creation. According to experts, DevOps isnt simply another IT activity but an enabler of value for its users; specifically referring to solutions delivered via effective and efficient value streams.
DevOps: Key DevOps Strategies
DevOps can be enabled in any organization by using a few basic DevOps strategies. Take a look at the "DevOps Enablers."
Infrastructure-As-A-Code And Automation
Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) offers IT administrators many benefits. From managing infrastructure provisioning or configuration management to automating your entire IT environment, using IaC as part of your management strategy should provide your cloud infrastructure with stability in its desired state; IaC should automatically address any deviation from that target state.
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration (CI) is an effective practice to streamline development operations. Continuous Integration enables code integration and build levels of automation while DevOps operates according to fast, automated systems; continuous integration facilitates frequent builds of code by developers.
Adopting Continuous Integration will save time during your development cycle by helping reduce time spent fixing regression bugs while emphasizing code quality.
A powerful CI pipeline will also assist in understanding your codebase more clearly while developing features to satisfy customers.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) is a software delivery strategy which enables teams to produce high-quality software quickly.
Continuous Delivery pipelines help cross-functional teams ensure software arrives according to schedule with minimal human intervention needed - an effective DevOps strategy geared toward building, testing, and releasing applications at speed.
Microservice Architecture
The software industry is experiencing a trend called microservices. Microservices are small, deployable services based on complex applications.
Microservices architecture is a more modern version of Service-Oriented Architecture. Microservices can communicate using different methods, and have the benefit of being technology-agnostic.
Container Management System
Containerized applications have quickly become the go-to release strategy in DevOps as products transition away from virtualized to containerized systems.
Kubernetes is an orchestration tool used by DevOps engineers who utilize Docker for container creation; Kubernetes then manages these containers within their app infrastructure while SaaS cloud models have become popular and Kubernetes plays an essential part in supporting multi-tenancy.
Kubernetes provides an effective means of adding scalability to infrastructure. Kubernetes allows for both vertical and horizontal scaling - giving your infrastructure maximum scalability at all times.
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Rapid Feedback
DevOps is not simply a job; its an approach. DevOps practices also facilitate fast feedback loops between business, IT operations, development teams and their users - providing teams with tools for becoming faster and more agile.
Feedback loops play an integral role in this process and ensure product delivery quickly at an increased rate; rapid feedback improves both cloud service products as well as processes; an example would be connecting CI/CD pipes to testing in order to provide resilient feedback loops, where devops engineer can monitor defects instantly before fixing it on site thereby helping reduce turnaround time on product delivery timelines significantly!
DevOps Evolution Model and Implementation Strategy
DevOps cannot be successfully accomplished by teams that merely adopt one set of practices and tools; structural and organizational adjustments need to be implemented as part of an overall DevOps strategy in order to be successful.
In the initial phases, DevOps adoption begins by selecting and installing necessary technologies that support its deployment and delivery model.
Normalization represents early continuous integration phases through version control systems while Standardization seeks to streamline this model further by streamlining deployment and delivery models.
Stage 3, and Stage 2 have reached convergence. Teams now enjoy greater autonomy and deployments are more streamlined.
At this point, cross-functional collaboration beyond Development and Operations becomes possible.
As we progress from stage 3 to 5, there is an increasingly tight coupling between systems and processes, and an increase in cohesion; software engineering relies on this DevOps principle for optimal design; teams in these stages should focus on automating as they focus more on providing value to the business than local problems.
Adopting DevOps approaches requires adopting an effective strategy. You may optimize it within your organizational structure by equipping people with knowledge and expertise while automating processes - eliminating waste while prioritizing business goals is now time.
DevOps Toolchain
DevOps doesnt have a set or fixed toolchain. Devops services is at its core a toolchain-determination service.
DevOps has multiple tools and multiple options for each step. Knowing your business requirements, costs of operation, and other factors is the key to choosing the best tool. Before choosing the right tool, you need to keep certain things in mind:
Operational cost: Do not overspend on tools
Knowledge: You need to be familiar with the skills of your remote team. Choose the tools that your team feels comfortable using.
Cloud offers: The tools you use are heavily dependent on the Cloud Service Provider that you choose.
They should also align with other IT policies and goals of your organization. Your IT infrastructure, including your networking resources, should be supported by the tools.
DevOps/Cloud Adoption Framework
Cloud adoption is an integral component of DevOps. As IT and software development has increasingly relied upon cloud service providers for application operation, its popularity is on an upswing.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) leads PaaS and IaaS offerings while its AWS Cloud Adoption Framework aided customers transition smoothly onto its services; Gartner Magic Quadrant analyses have reinforced AWS as the market leader confirming this view that AWS supports IT infrastructure needs.
AWS Cloud Adoption Framework helps businesses develop and execute highly effective plans to ease the transition into adopting cloud technology.
AWS CAF provides guidance, comprehensive tools, and expertise that allows IT organizations to migrate seamlessly onto AWS - and reap all its advantages faster with less risk than before!
Cloud Adoption Framework helps organizations quickly understand cloud adoption techniques. With it comes an ability to quickly identify gaps and risks when adopting cloud practices - as well as other advantages associated with Cloud Adoption Framework such as:
Business agility is improved.
Cloud Service Providers offer a pay as you go model.
Read More: Which Tech Jobs Pay Best?: DevOps, Data Scientist or Python Developer
DevOps Implementation Strategy - A Step-By-Step Guide
DevOps emerged to address these problems between development and operations departments; their goals and incentives vary significantly, leading them to pursue different courses of action.
Its creation allows organizations to remove bottlenecks while improving innovation through unification between two worlds of IT.
Attain five essential objectives when developing a DevOps plan: security, scalability, reliability, cooperation and frequent and quick delivery.
Although DevOps is often associated with Agile development methodologies due to their iterative processes and complementary natures; DevOps should still be treated as its own project.
Here are some steps to create a roadmap for DevOps that is successful in your organization.
1)Assess Your Current Condition
DevOps implementation in real world settings can be challenging, since replacing outdated methods with modern approaches requires considerable planning.
Before embarking on any such implementations, however, you should first assess both your pre-DevOps state as a company and any patterns for apps you plan to build that you may encounter during implementation.
Netflix was left unable to ship DVDs for three days due to a major database corruption incident in 2008. As a result of this experience, they recognized the need to switch from horizontally-scalable, highly reliable cloud systems into vertically scalable single point of failure cloud platforms such as AWS.
After seven years of effort they successfully completed this historical migration to AWS.
Netflix was experiencing growing pains with monolithic systems as their subscriber base expanded. Customizing Windows images required manual work that took too much time and caused errors; when these issues became evident to them, Netflix conducted a detailed examination to better their service and methodology with new technologies and custom devops tools; which we will discuss further later.
2) Develop Devops Mindset And Culture
DevOps can best be described as a culture shift focused on increasing communication, collaboration and transparency between teams of development and operations, to reduce chaos from occurring between them.
Gartner estimates that 75% of DevOps projects may fail by 2022 due to issues surrounding organizational learning and change management issues.
Etsy provides us with an invaluable lesson. Their DevOps journey exemplifies an indomitable spirit and determination among their team; prior to DevOps adoption they used traditional waterfall methods of development for growth at an astoundingly steady rate.
DevOps allowed them to build an extremely cooperative team - one you would want on your side when the website goes down - which helped them reach 80 releases per day, rather than once every two weeks.
Be mindful that setting clear expectations and cultivating psychological safety are crucial elements to creating a DevOps Culture within an organization, enabling all processes, people and tools to come together toward creating a more streamlined customer service offering.
3) Define Your DevOps Process
By setting out DevOps as part of your strategy from day one, you may improve the infrastructure provisioning procedure, continuous development cycle and testing procedures.
Below are various phases involved in breaking down communication and alignment barriers between traditionally siloed teams.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
Continuous Integration (CI) is the foundation of DevOps wherein developers incorporate changes back into a central code repository, while Continuous Delivery continues where continuous Integration concludes: applications are automatically sent out into predetermined cloud environments such as testing or development environments for testing purposes.
Automating Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery enables organizations to adapt quickly to changing consumer needs while assuring quality updates of applications.
Spotifys Technology Infrastructure Groups Product Managers have been tirelessly working on tools and best practices that automate processes, making the company fully DevOps compliant.
Tingle was designed with this goal in mind: it aims to offer teams a consistent CI/CD experience across jobs; teams can quickly setup new projects without being held back by pipeline configuration knowledge - in fact it helps speed setup times by up to five minutes between setup and first build!
Continuous Testing
Continuous software testing is required to ensure that users receive quality applications. The quick feedback also improves software quality.
Netflix is the poster child for DevOps. We can say it has developed a DevOps-culture organically. In 2011, Netflix created a tool called Chaos Monkey to test the resilience and stability of its IT infrastructure.
It deliberately disables computers within Netflixs network of production to see how they react to an outage.
Continuous Deployment
The final phase in the pipeline, continuous deployment, is the automatic launch and distribution of desktop software artifacts to end users through scripts or other tools.
Amazons DevOps is renowned. In 2010, it moved to DevOps as part of the move from physical servers into AWS cloud.
Amazon has also begun using a continuous delivery process, managed by a system internally called Apollo. Developers can deploy code on any server they choose. Amazon deployed new software to production servers on average every 11.6 seconds by 2011.
Read More: Benefits & Challenges Of DevOps Mobile App Development
Microservice Architecture
Microservices are a relatively new trend within the software industry, and theyre perfect for DevOps. Complex applications and tiny deployable services that carry out certain business logic constitute the foundation of this architecture.
The development, testing, and deployment processes can then be handled independently by delivery teams. The main benefit?
Microservice architecture is widely used in modern service-oriented industries. Ubers backend, for example, has a microservice architecture that is excellent.
It has several thousand microservices which interact via remote procedure call (RPC).
Container Management System
Containers have quickly become the go-to tool for packaging, isolating and deploying microservices. Containers allow users to efficiently package all dependencies, libraries, single source code and configuration files of their application into one single object - perfect for deployment larger apps using Kubernetes as orchestrator for managing and controlling these clusters.
Netflix, in their quest for scaling, have turned to containerization in their effort for greater scalability. To meet their individual requirements and streamline this process, Titus was developed as their container management tool; Titus supports key business operations including video streaming, content encoding, recommendation engines, machine learning technologies as well as studio technologies as well as engineering tools used internally by Netflix.
4) Choose Your DevOps Toolchain
By selecting and implementing innovative processes, its possible to develop personalized workflows, ensure robust infrastructure and access control systems as well as ensure smooth functionality.
In order to guarantee seamless integration it is vitally important that tools selected match compatibility requirements, tech stack and cloud provider.
DevOps consultants use various tools to assist each phase of the DevOps Process.
DevOps offers many advantages for eCommerce companies. Shopify was one of the first major e-commerce platforms to adopt DevOps; Kubernetes allows it to increase page response times while decreasing infrastructure costs.
5) Ensure Compliance And Security
DevOps Security refers to the practice of safeguarding all aspects of DevOps by employing policies, technologies, processes and strategies designed to secure its ecosystem - from design through release, testing to maintenance - should incorporate security.
DevSecOp is one name used for such DevOps security solutions.
DevOps allows large batches of code to be developed quickly. Unfortunately, security teams often lack time for code reviews; and without automated code analysis, configuration validation, or vulnerability scanning procedures in place; DevOps may face operational challenges that need addressing immediately.
So what should you do?
Create transparent cyber policies and procedures, and administer policy and governance
- Deconstructing apps into microservices allows security teams to streamline security reviews.
- DevOps security processes and technologies should be automated because containers and other tools frequently lead to security flaws.
- Use Continuous Monitoring (CM), to detect and observe security issues during each stage of software development.
- Automate test execution for the review and validation of a software product
- Perform vulnerability assessment to identify vulnerabilities in the pre-production code
- Configuration management is required for all servers, code/builds, and virtual, physical and cloud assets.
- Using privileged access management, keep an eye on and manage access
6) Identifying And Measuring Devops Metrics
DevOps focuses on three primary goals: velocity, application performance and quality assurance. Teams should collect, analyze and measure metrics aligned to key performance indicators (KPIs) that support continuous improvement - these measurements serve as important means for controlling and monitoring software development pipelines.
Although multiple metrics exist to measure DevOps, here are the core ones every DevOps group should track.
Deployment Frequency- 75% organizations view Deployment Frequency as a key metric for evaluating the effectiveness of DevOps.
By comparing the deployment speed of your company over a long period, you can map its velocity and growth.
- Lead Time to Changes - This is a metric that measures how responsive an organization is to user needs, within the companys goals. You should keep a record of the changes that were made to the deployment.
- Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) - You can use MTTR to measure the amount of time it takes to recover after a production error. You must strive to reduce it over time in order to give the best experience to users. The old Mean Time To Failure is less important than MTTR.
- Mean Time to Failure- If Google cloud, for example, had a two-year MTTF, but a 13-hour downtime the world would be aware. Few people would be concerned if there were two failures each day, with less than a minute of downtime.
Other metrics you can measure include:
- Financial (software development cost, cost of introducing a process, cost savings, and so on)
- Customer perspective (number and type of defects, time to market etc.).
- Innovation perspective (number enhancements in the pipeline)
- Internal procedure (change failure rate, change volume, defect escape rate, cycle time, etc.)
7) Create A Multi-Functional Product Team
DevOps teams are charged with optimizing product delivery and value throughout its development lifecycle, from conception to retirement.
Your DevOps team should consist of software engineers as well as operators; some team members excel at writing code while others specialize in managing infrastructure operations.
DevOps teams in large organizations usually consist of six roles. These are software developers, automation architects, security engineers, DevOps advocates (or champions), and quality assurance (QA) engineers responsible for both manual and automated testing.
Developers.dev diverse development team guarantees smooth operation of the DevOps Pipeline. Developers.dev experts can assist with creating and implementing an all-encompassing DevOps approach, from choosing tools to implement to measuring progress over time.
In addition, our experienced test environment managers work efficiently so as to save your company money.
DevOps pipelines allow companies to effectively implement DevOps strategies.
Working closely with the tech team, DevOps helped implement continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) for faster releases as well as automating Jenkins applications for application automation ensuring smooth launches of fully functional websites on schedule and no downtime issues occurred during launch of fully functioning websites on schedule and no delays.
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Conclusion: Devops Is Ready For Implementation!
To successfully implement the DevOps Model, first assess and set realistic objectives. No changes should occur overnight - such as telling teams they must release five times every month instead of just one.
Your organization requires greater structure. In order to accept changes, individuals will require education and training as well as time.
A partner with a highly-skilled team will also help reap DevOps benefits successfully; let us work together toward helping your business reach new heights!
