7 Measures For Implementing DevOps Strategy In The Businesses

“The Strategy of DevOps should be a customer-value approach driven to furnish solutions using agile collaboration, methods, and automation,” mentioned in the 2020 report of DevOps Adoption Frameworks by Gartner. DevOps stands for Development plus Operations, which is nothing but an amalgamation of two existing IT wings for ages in the industry. It is a unified and collaborative effort between the operations and the development. Gone are the times when an experienced developer is employed for days to write a code and then hold to get it deployed for hours. That's where DevOps emerged as the game-changer in optimizing the whole effort of planning, building, implementing, operating, and deploying the code. Efforts and Struggles have arrived down from days to a few minutes.

Regarding application and product teams, DevOps is additionally more than a technology or a tool as DevOps is a civilization that leads organizations, teams, and individuals by eliminating communication bottlenecks and manages to formalize the settings or background with robust automation. There are certain immediate advantages that teams of engineering can leverage by adopting and embracing the strategies of DevOps:

✓ Continuous Integration - Faster code build 

✓ Continuous Deployment - Faster code deployment

✓ Better product quality

✓ Faster delivery 

✓ Better productivity

✓ Reduced time to market 

✓ Better collaboration and teamwork

DevOps Implementation Strategy Guide

As we understand, both the departments conventionally, development and operations, have different goals and incentives. Unfortunately, the incompatible roles usually direct to the blame game of “dev vs. ops.” As we understand, both the departments conventionally, development and operations, have different goals and incentives. Unfortunately, the incompatible roles usually direct to the blame game of “dev vs. ops.” DevOps appeared as a solution to these problems. Transparency of the DevOps plan allows the businesses to clear the bottlenecks that delayed the innovation by combining two worlds of IT.

While creating a strategy of DevOps, individuals should aim to accomplish five parameters — reliability, scalability, frequent, collaboration, and rapid delivery and security. Here, you must hear a lot that Agile and DevOps go hand-in-hand. Yes, the relationship between agile and DevOps is complementary, with their iterative nature. However, the approach of DevOps should be feted as a particular initiative. The following steps will complete a successful implementation of the DevOps roadmap for the organization.

Assess The Current State

The real-world implementations of DevOps will be challenging as it is consistently complex to substitute the current techniques with modern ones. So, first, individuals require to analyze the Pre-DevOps situation of the company thoroughly and understand the patterns of solutions for the applications they enjoy constructing. 

For example, the entertainment platform Netflix could not dispatch DVDs to its members for 3 days because of significant corruption in the database in 2008. This circumstance caused them to recognize that they must move out from single vertically-scaled points of loss towards highly reliable, horizontally-scalable, distributed systems in the cloud. After seven diligent efforts years, Netflix finished its historical cloud migration to AWS as a result in 2016.

Besides, with growing subscribers, The struggle Netflix with the increase of the monolith system. Also, customizing Windows prints was time-consuming, manual, and error-prone. Understanding the current state of the company made Netflix thoroughly mindful of all these difficulties. Consequently, they enhanced the service deployment and methodology by developing their own tools and leveraging new technologies, which we will discuss later in this blog.

Develop A DevOps Mindset and Culture

Ultimately, the cultural shift of DevOps is about improving transparency,  communication, and collaboration between operation and development teams; or else there can be better chaos. Gartner documents the same and focuses on indicating that because of the problems around organizational change and learning, 75% of DevOps endeavors would fail to fulfill anticipations through 2022.

We can discover a vital lesson from the Etsy example, which is an online marketplace. Its journey with DevOps is all around a spirit of indomitable of a team that counts its victory by failure. Pre-DevOps, Etsy was regularly growing, following the approach of the traditional waterfall.

DevOps allowed them to maintain a group at ease with each other, the type every individual would enjoy in their intersection when the zone breaks. This attitude enabled them to reach 80 releases daily instead of deploying the code weekly. Two points individuals should hold in mind are – transparency concerning anticipations and an atmosphere of psychological safety. Then they can develop and materialize a proper culture of DevOps in the company that will allow them to proceed further and align the tools, processes, and people toward a better-unified focus on the customer.

Define The DevOps Process

By determining and defining the process of DevOps from the beginning, an individual can enhance the provisioning of infrastructure, continuous cycle of development, and testing. The pursuit is numerous stages of the approach to bridge the alignment gap and communication between teams of traditionally siloed.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)

Continuous integration is a prior practices of DevOps where professional developers merge the changes consistently to the central repository in their code back, and continuous delivery brings up from where continuous integration completes. It automates the application delivery to the selected infrastructure environments like development and testing. CI/CD automation allows associations to respond to the developing requirements of customers and provide updates on quality applications.

Spotify’s Product managers at Technology Infrastructure Group operate diligently to produce tools, establish the most promising practices for processes of automation, and make Spotify a dedicated company of DevOps. They formed Tingle with a vision of providing a common experience of CI/CD for all sorts of positions, helping teams put up unexplored projects quickly without worrying about the knowledge of pipeline configuration. The device is their centralized CI/CD system for backend, data, and web services. It even helps in diminishing the moment from set-up to the preferably creation and deployment to 5 minutes from 14 days.

Continuous Testing

CI/CD needs continuous testing of software to provide users with quality applications, and inherently, the immediate feedback enhances the quality of the software. If we speak again about the DevOps child poster – Netflix, we can tell that it created an organic DevOps culture. For example, Netflix developed a tool named ‘Chaos Monkey,’ in the year 2011 for testing the strength and stability of its infrastructure of IT. It deliberately undermines computers in the production network of Netflix to test how the remaining strategies react to the outage.

Microservice Architecture

Microservices are a comparatively modern software industry trend and are tailor-made for DevOps. This architecture models services of small deployable that accomplish detailed logic of business around complex applications. So, teams that work on delivery can tackle individual services independently and simplify testing, development, and deployment. Main advantage? One service does not impact or crash other aspects of an app!  

The architecture of microservice is extensively utilised and employed across contemporary service-oriented industries. For example, the backend of Uber has an excellent architecture of microservice. It contains a thousand microservices that focus on interacting with one another through RPC or remote procedure calls.

Container Management System

There is an emerging practice of using containers to package, isolate, and deploy microservices. The individual can package the source code of the application, configuration files, dependencies, and libraries in a single object with containers. Numerous containers are deployed as container clusters for deploying more applications that are extensive. Container orchestrators such as Kubernetes are utilized to maintain and operate these clusters.

Netflix has even tried implementing containerization for scalability in its endless pursuit. It has created its tool for container management, named Titus, for handling its unique requirements and streamlining the process further, focuses on powers crucial elements of the streaming business such as content-encoding, video streaming, machine learning, recommendations, big data, internal engineering tools, studio technology, and other workloads.

Select DevOps Toolchain

The preference for the proper tools and new innovative processes permits people to build a robust infrastructure, deliver customized workflows, and for smooth functionality by accessing controls and smooth integration; they must choose the devices with your IT environment relying on their compatibility, choice of the cloud provider, and requirements and tech stack. The consultants of DevOps utilize diverse tools of the DevOps process for each of the relevant phases.

ProcessesToolsVirtual infrastructureVMware vCloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft AzureConfiguration managementPuppet, Salt, Ansible, ChefContinuous integrationJenkins, CircleCI, Bamboo, Gitlab, TeamCityContinuous deploymentOctopus Deploy, AWS CodeDeploy, GitLab, DeployBotContinuous deliveryMaven, DockerContainer managementRed Hat OpenShift, Cloud FoundryContinuous testingSelenium, Eggplant, Appium, TestsigmaContainer orchestrationKubernetes, OpenShift, Docker Swarm, Apache Mesos, Rancher

Having an adoption strategy for DevOps is profitable for eCommerce companies. For example, Shopify was the 1st significant platform of eCommerce to implement tools of DevOps in their business by using Kubernetes, which helped Shopify improve the response speed and reduce expenses of infrastructure significantly the page.

Ensure Security And Compliance

The security of DevOps is the practice and discipline of protecting the complete environment of DevOps through policies, technology, processes, and methods. Organizations must implant protection throughout the lifecycle of the DevOps, including design, inception, construct, release, examination, supervision, and beyond. This sort of security of DevOps is known as DevSecOp. 

Code batches are tested and changed over pretty quick time frames with DevOps. Often teams of security may not hold up with reviews of the code, and if parameters of security like configuration checks, code analysis, and vulnerability scanning are not automated sufficiently, the output of DevOps might have weaknesses that are operational. So, what should an individual do?

• Administer governance and policy, make transparent cybersecurity procedures and policies.

• ​​Integrate protection into practices of CI/CD; the teams of security can deconstruct apps to simplify security reviews into microservices.

• Automate the DevOps security tools and processes because containers and other devices carry risks, often constructing gaps for security.

• Employment Continuous Monitoring (CM) to detect and monitor compliance issues and security threats during the life cycle of software development stages.  

• Implementing test automation for validating and reviewing a software product

• Identify weaknesses and conducting vulnerability assessment in pre-production code

• Adoption of configuration management across code/builds and servers for physical, virtual, and cloud assets.

• Monitor and manage access with privileged access administration

Identify And Measure DevOps Metrics

The primary DevOps implementation goals are – quality assurance, velocity, and performance of the application. Teams must gather, research, and measure metrics aligned with the multiple appropriate goals of the business and for continuous improvement, utilizing KPIs. These metrics will supply the individual with the vital data required to have control and visibility over the pipeline of software development. Though numerous metrics assist in measuring the performance of DevOps, the following are the pivotal metrics every team of DevOps should measure.

• Deployment Frequency

• Lead Time to Changes

• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

• Financial

• Customer Perspective

• Innovation Perspective

• Internal Procedure

  
  

Devlop a Cross-Functional Product Team

A team of DevOps has to optimize product value and delivery throughout the lifecycle of the product. For that, the team should consist of the individual having advanced skills in both software operations and engineering. However, what ensues typically is – some group members are professionals in code while others are more suitable for managing and operating infrastructure. Big organizations primarily have six critical positions in a team of DevOps. These roles are – release manager, DevOps evangelist, QA engineer, software developer for automated testing and manual testing, security engineer, and automation architect.

If a newbie is about to begin the journey of DevOps model implementation, the first thing they must do is evaluate the current status and set goals that are realistic in nature. The transformations of DevOps cannot be achieved overnight. After all, they cannot tell the teams to institute five getaways a day instead of a single release a month, can they? The organization should include a more structured strategy as everyone aboard's intention require a bunch of training, education, and time, of course, to utilize to whole changes. Also, they will require a partner with an expert team to ensure that they are achieving all the advantages of DevOps.