Implementing DevOps practices can significantly accelerate software releases while ensuring the creation of high-quality applications. However, the DevOps methodology cannot be purchased, incorporated, or declared a “reference model.” If your company is considering implementing this method, we have identified six steps below that will allow you to make this important transition successfully.
Understanding how best to work Agile and deliver customer services quickly without compromising on quality continues to be one of the biggest challenges in our industry. Still, thanks to our many years of experience in DevOps Consulting with clients across various industries, we can give you some advice essential to effectively embrace the DevOps “change.
Embrace The DevOps Mindset
Implementing the DevOps methodology doesn’t start by simply saying, “We do DevOps,” and starting to use its tools. Your entire organization will need to understand what DevOps is, what business needs DevOps satisfies, and most importantly, everyone must be willing to change how things have always been done. How to begin, then, by and by? The principal approach is distinguishing current application esteem streams – the exercises that take items from improvement to creation.
It is essential to comprehend if there are limitations, bottlenecks, or blockages inside this cycle to zero in on further developing it. Recognizing any failure in the conveyance cycle should be jumped all over as a chance to carry out the change. To do this, the organization and the reference group should explore: momentary disappointment is to be thought of as a wellspring of learning and improvement. An incredible beginning stage to get to this is to urge the association to pose inquiries like: “For what reason do we do this [process]? What is its business esteem? How might we make it more proficient?”
Associations frequently compare DevOps with robotization. While computerization can assist with accelerating manual cycles, the DevOps procedure is essentially based on cooperation and correspondence. Process robotization will convey the ideal business benefits areas of strength for coordinated effort rehearses between programming improvement accomplices (especially in testing, conveyance, and activities).
Get The Most Out Of Metrics
One of the most disregarded drives in DevOps reception is choosing the right measurements to track and screen progress. In the underlying stage, it is fundamental to lay out DevOps measurements connected with business goals that characterize the line to follow and be strong in estimating information that initially may not appear to be positive. In our experience, these are some of the most useful DevOps metrics:
- Production Failure Rate: How often the software fails to go into production during a given period
- Average Recovery Time: How long it takes for a production application to recover from a failure
- Average Lead Time: How long it takes for a new requirement to be created, tested, delivered, and implemented into production
- Development Velocity: How quickly a new version of an application can be developed in a particular environment (integration, test, staging, pre-production, or production environments)
- Development Frequency: How often are new releases developed and selected for testing, staging, pre-production, and production environments
- Average production time: how long it takes for a new code to be deployed in production once committed within a repository.
After you determine which metrics to measure and identify your business’s current state, we recommend setting goals for each metric so your team knows what to look for. It is important to constantly share goals, metrics, and progress made with everyone involved. Achieving high levels of transparency is often a challenge. Still, ensuring more effective communication and collaboration is critical, breaking down the barriers between the Dev and Ops teams involved in the process.
Look For The Solution To Your Specific Needs
Each organization voyages a remarkable DevOps venture connected to its business and culture. That excursion will be fixated on working on individuals’ propensities and correspondence designs and on the devices to carry out the various practices. The DevOps strategy speeds up the creation and conveyance of value programming however is effectively provided that zeroed in on the genuine requirements of the single association. For instance, if it doesn’t appear legit for your clients to introduce ten to twenty updates to your item daily, don’t make that your objective.
All things being equal, center around working on the convenience, security, or another critical quality of your application that your client often thinks about the most. Numerous arrangements permit you to carry out DevOps arrangements, and it is vital to zero in on the particular business needs and the qualities of the singular programming. To work with your pursuit, we might want to list the primary practices and the arrangements we prescribe to embrace them best:
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery – CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise
- Containers and microservices – Red Hat Openshift, Docker, and Kubernetes
- Social Coding and Code Hosting – GitHub
- Log management and analytics – Elastic
- Continuous monitoring – Icinga
- Configuration management – Ansible and Puppet.
Adopt DevOps Iteratively
We recommend waiting to roll out a full enterprise-wide DevOps initiative early on. It’s ideal to recognize a pilot project, structure a cross-useful DevOps group that incorporates dev, test, and tasks, inspect the worth stream to decide failures, and make an underlying organization pipeline that tends to a portion of the cycle requirements. Measure progress and achievement, fix botches, begin once again, and rehash.
It is prudent to address the significant worth stream failures first, as this will influence the business the most. Some of these will not be difficult to fix, while others will take more time, particularly if they include process changes to be carried out across groups. Guarantee individuals included are powerhouses who can take the standards learned back to their particular groups; keeping your experience enveloped with your pilot won’t assist you with successfully spreading the philosophy across the organization.
Value Quality Control From The Outset
Organizations that need to carry out the DevOps strategy frequently center around computerizing improvement, dismissing the quality control needs. While carrying out DevOps, mechanizing a few tests is conceivable. Computerizing those proceeded as a feature of the consistent combination cycle, and all tests acted in the conveyance interaction is basic. Computerizing practical and non-useful tests related to security, execution, and other quality attributes can frequently speed up these exercises.
Take A Smart Approach To Automation
Automation is the key to accelerating delivery processes, and everything it involves (infrastructure, environment, configuration, platform, build, test, process, etc.) must be defined in code form. If any process is time-consuming or prone to errors or interruptions, automate this first – this will reduce lead times, increase repeatability and eliminate setup delays. Standardize your approach to automation to guarantee developers, operations, and QA a common frame of reference and a common language. The automation quality is essential to ensure the quality of your application.
At this point, implementing the DevOps Methodology and its practices requires a lot of effort, time, and discipline. Based on our experience, however, companies that follow the above points will have the right basis to face the DevOps journey successfully. The help of an expert DevOps Partner can also help guide and enable the transformation, making it faster and more direct to corporate and business objectives through the choice of the best technologies and their implementation.
Also Read: 4 Good Reasons To Migrate Company SAP To Google Cloud
