How to Implement DevOps in Your Business
Because DevOps is largely influenced by Agile, any firm transitioning to an automated environment should be aware of the cultural contrasts that exist between formerly segmented departments and what will occur when a converged DevOps team is formed. Some team members may have hesitation and concern as a result of various fallacies surrounding the challenges that companies face, but many of these roadblocks may be solved by implementing a new lifecycle that incorporates best practices and thorough planning ahead of time.
Is DevOps Worth the Time and Money?
Before pushing forward with DevOps, firms must first determine whether the effort is worthwhile. Making bad corporate culture decisions may be devastating for employee retention, thus it’s understandably vital to make sure that the new software development lifecycles and procedures benefit the firm in terms of employees and budgets.
According to the 2019 “State of DevOps” study, 20% of firms that used Agile and DevOps in their development lifecycle were outstanding performers, with testing to production deployment taking only a few hours.DevOps may save time and money for companies that need to update their software frequently, thanks to faster delivery, fewer defects, and better vulnerability scans.
Other advantages of DevOps include:
Improved development operations assistance, resulting in fewer configuration or infrastructure issues during testing and promotion.
Better communication between development and operations, resulting in a more smooth development lifecycle with less conflicts between the two teams.
Increased scalability and dependability when both teams decide on DevOps techniques, including Agile adaptations. Cross-skill training allows operations to learn more about development while developers learn about network and server management. Due to coordination between both teams, issue solutions for important downtime are completed faster.
Steps to DevOps Adoption
The first step for firms just getting started is to recognize that Agile is an important aspect of DevOps. Most development teams already employ Agile in some form, but Agile in operations is usually a novel concept. Agile can be tweaked, with some components added and others removed, to match the needs of the organization and its people. Even after implementing DevOps, methods and the development lifecycle can be revisited and improved until they are as efficient as feasible. The steps below are high-level principles that can help you get started.
Bring development and operations together and embrace a team mentality.
Most companies don’t just throw the idea of a DevOps team at employees unless it’s already been addressed. The most crucial initial step is to get everyone together and ensure that they understand the new culture and process.
Both teams can work together to define a vision for how DevOps will work, as well as responsibilities for each team member and the tools that will be most beneficial. The present delivery process can be evaluated, and procedures that specify how code is built, tested, and delivered can be defined.
Although automation is an important aspect of DevOps, effective procedures necessitate collaboration among team members. To ensure future scalability of the chosen systems and tools, all DevOps team members must embrace the attitude and establish the appropriate procedures collectively.
Metrics can be used to identify areas for improvement and changes that are required.
Hopefully, you already have analytics in place to help you discover areas where you can improve. What percentage of rollbacks are required because of bugs, for example? When a mistake is reported, how long does it take for a fix to be deployed? How long does it take for application support resources to be provisioned? These and other questions might help you figure out the best strategy to handle DevOps and the development lifecycle. Other measures that may be relevant include:
Failure rate: How frequently is code deployed and needs to be rapidly remedied or turned back?
Average time to recover: How long does it take to recover from a problem or downtime when code is sent to production?
Time it takes for a product to go from concept to production: There are various stages to the development lifecycle. You may quantify the time it takes from the moment developers are assigned a sprint to the time the changes are delivered to production by breaking down the average time for each stage (e.g. development, testing, and deployment).
Time it takes to deploy to each step: How long does it take to deploy to each step? (e.g. testing, staging, production). This statistic can pinpoint bottlenecks in a single process step.
Frequency of deployments: How frequently can deployments keep up with developers and testers? Is it possible to deploy straight immediately or do you have to wait? This statistic, once again, aids in the detection of bottlenecks.
Time to the production repository on average: How long does it take to go from development to production? This measure identifies if there is a bottleneck between “ready for production” and “production deployment.”
Once you have measurements, you can set DevOps goals and see where you can make the most progress in the shortest amount of time. You may chip away at costly bottlenecks and uncover solutions that improve productivity during the development lifecycle by prioritizing targets. Some procedures may even work well under the current structure, but DevOps can always help with at least one bottleneck to speed up the process.
Create a strategy and a list of requirements.
Even if you follow best practices, each organization has its own set of criteria. Following the collection of metrics, you can determine which areas of development demand the most attention, allowing you to build some requirements around your prioritizing. Because there is no such thing as a “one-size-fits-all” solution, the planning stage is crucial to the success of your new DevOps team.
This stage is crucial to the success of DevOps. The procedures must not only be compatible with the development process, but also with the company’s overall structure and objectives.For example, a company that sells products outside of IT but has an internal development team to support tools and website features may have different goals than a company that sells products outside of IT but has an internal development team to support tools and website features.
Keep in mind that IT should support customers, and customers are also employees of the company. Create procedures that assist user requirements while also working to make the environment faster, rather than goals that force users to change. Create a plan to accommodate 5 updates every day, for example, without requiring the client to minimize the amount of changes requested.
Step-by-Step Implementation of the New Team Design
It’s tempting to create a strategy and then implement it all at once. Both the DevOps team and customers may find this challenging. It can also be challenging for any IT personnel who works directly with DevOps because they must alter their own practices. Rather than imposing massive cultural and procedural changes on everyone at once, it’s ideal to implement processes in stages.
The fact that it is more easy for consumers and employees isn’t the sole reason to embrace slowly. DevOps is an automation-oriented culture, thus these tools and configurations must be well tested.Before any new procedures are trusted and implemented, the complete environment must be tested from testing to deployment to production.
Steps can be taken to incorporate DevOps into current deployment processes. Deployment from development to testing, for example, is the least dangerous of the three options of testing, staging, and production. Continuous integration (CI) tools will compile and deploy codebase changes to a testing environment automatically. Because any faults in this automation process will not affect production code, it might serve as a good starting point for DevOps adoption.
Following the testing and remediation of all CI defects, the next step would be to integrate DevOps into the staging environment. Although there is normally a group in staging that verifies code before deploying it to production, the staging environment should be identical to production. The number of issues that will be seen in production is reduced by introducing DevOps solutions to staging. Because this stage usually has an impact on persons outside of development, it should be done with greater care and deliberation. It’s also the last phase before production, and it can be utilized to find any potential production automation flaws.
Testing and Quality Assurance should be implemented.
While it is never a good idea to rush changes, goals and deadlines are frequently a top priority when making changes to an environment. The quality of testing has a direct impact on the final product’s quality. Delaying DevOps automation is costly, but adding significant faults into the development process is even more costly. It is crucial for success and trust in the capabilities of all automation across the environment.
Testing should be done by DevOps personnel, but it can also be done in collaboration with other members of the team who will benefit.Just make sure you thoroughly test every component of automation before approving it off and pushing it to production.
Conclusion
It doesn’t have to be tough to use DevOps practices. It also doesn’t have to disregard your company’s objectives and requirements. Adopting a new method might be challenging, but it can eventually lead to a far more efficient software development lifecycle that saves time and money for enterprises.