To provide value to consumers, organizations merge development and operations, resulting in DevOps. This is often done to make the business more consumer-centric and boost productivity. DevOps has been in the market for a very long time however not all the organizations have yet developed any strategy or plan to implement cloud DevOps in their business model to get the major benefits. Do you know that there are various businesses that have actually formed their business around DevOps to increase profit?
In this blog, we are going to outline how can you develop the right strategy for your business and when should you revise your DevOps process to make out the most profit.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is more of a strategy that helps in faster and enhanced application of products to derive excellent benefits. It accelerates the development and transparency between the IT team responsible for operations and the development team.
Though many organizations overlook the importance of DevOps, it is not wise in the longer run. When connected the two teams can strategize, test, revise, build, implement and analyze the product and codes. Teams often integrate various tools to build a secure system helping to streamline the process and provide more opportunities to collaborate.
Benefits of DevOps
The application of DevOps offers numerous business and technical benefits, resulting in happy and satisfied customers. These benefits are mentioned below:
- Faster product delivery
- Quick issue resolution
- Reduced complexity
- Greater availability and scalability
- More stable operating environments
- Better resource utilization
- Better automation
- Enhanced visibility into system outcomes
- Greater innovation
Step-by-step guide for DevOps Implementation
Implementing a targeted process will help you bottleneck innovation and success. Here we have step by step guide for you for a successful DevOps process in your business to derive more gain-
Analyze your organization’s current status
Mingling two different strategies can be chaotic, so it is best to first analyze the structure that is currently implemented and understand the patterns and whether they match with the new structure or not.
Develop a DevOps culture in your compan
DevOps is a cultural shift that boosts communication, transparency as well as collaboration between operation and development teams. Two points to always keep in mind are – to create an environment of psychological safety and improve clarity regarding expectations. It will help your team to develop a proper culture in your organization and align your tools, processes, and people toward a more unified customer pivot.
Create and define the DevOps process
DevOps practices always reflect the idea of constant improvement and automation.
These practices include:
Continuous development: It involves version-control mechanisms to handle each planning and coding phase of its lifecycle.
Continuous testing: It incorporates prescheduled, automated, and continued code tests once an application code is written or updated.
Continuous integration (CI) : This practice merges test and development tools with configuration management (CM) tools to track the code being developed and ready for production. Thus, it quickly identifies and resolves code issues.
Continuous delivery: It automates the changes made in the delivery of code, after testing, to a preproduction or staging environment.
Continuous deployment (CD): This practice automates the release of fresh or changed code into production. Continuous deployment might release all necessary changes several times per day.
Continuous monitoring: It involves ongoing monitoring of both code(in operation) along with the underlying infrastructure that holds it up.
Infrastructure as code: This practice is used during different stages of this software implementation to automate the equipping of infrastructure needed for a software release.
Finalize which toolchain you want to deploy
In the first step of implementation or to innovate any idea, the selection of a toolchain is mandatory. It will help you in customizing workflow, to help you build a strong infra, get in control, and function smoothly. While selecting the tools, remember to check whether it integrates with your organization’s IT infrastructure, meets your set requirements, and integrates with your cloud.
You can use various tools for each phase of DevOps relevant to your need:
- For configuration- Salt, Puppet, Chef
- For infrastructure- VMware Cloud, Amazon Web Services
- For integration- Bamboo, CircleCI, Jenkins, TeamCity
- For delivery- Maven or Docker
- For deployment- Octopus Deploy, GitLab, AWS CodeDeploy
- For testing- Appium, Selenium, Test Sigma
- For management- Red Hat OpenShift
- For orchestration- Apache Mesos, Rancher, Docker Swarm
Keep security in check
As an organization, it is mandatory for you to deploy and embed security in the DevOps to maintain the cycle. You can also deploy DevSecOp which includes incepting, designing, building, testing, maintaining, and much more. Not reviewing the code and implementing the security may lead to breach in your implemented strategy. Here’s how you can keep security in line-
- Administer all the governance policies
- Ask security teams to regularly review the security
- Put your application security in automation
- Deploy continuous monitoring to detect any form of threat
- Continuous vulnerability checks
Recognize & Measure DevOps metrics
Remember why you are actually implementing the best strategy in your organization, for quality assurance, maintaining velocity, and enhanced application performance. Collect all the KPIs and the business goals and measure the metrics to analyze the success of recent implementation. These metrics will help in adding in your strategy, figuring out your loopholes, and checking the finances as well for the tools being used.
Cross-functional product team
The cross-functional product team will help you to analyze the product’s value and efficiency. Get engineers with experience in operations as well. Hire an evangelist for DevOps, software developer, release manager, manual testing QA engineer, automation architect, automated testing engineer, and security engineer.
When should you revise your strategy?
The key pillars of your DevOps strategy help you to build a strong foundation and keep your organization on track during this journey. When you start finding that the planned strategy is no longer meeting your goals, and vision of DevOps, it’s the right time to revise it by following these steps:
Start by isolating your important issues
First, find the answer to the question: “what DevOps problem are you looking to solve?” Don’t try to solve all problems simultaneously. Start with gathering a team to brainstorm and rank all the problems. This way, you can look for bright opportunities to categorize your DevOps problems into common root causes, organizational areas, or impact effects.
Evaluate available solutions
The solution to your current issue may either involve a process improvement or using a new tool. Just like with detaching specific problems, you should select the solutions using input from across DevOps and the organization altogether. Indirectly, brainstorm your options and then assess them on a case-by-case basis.
Build a new process and revisit continually as needed
Once you get a new solution, speed some time visualizing a new end-to-end process. This step actually requires a holistic and end-to-end approach to solve different challenges. It is not sufficient just to recognize a fix for an isolated pocket within this process, you will also need to tackle new challenges lower in your priority list
Hope we have met your expectations in providing you with the right solutions to both of your problems.
About Us: Algoworks is a B2B IT firm providing end-to-end product development services. Operating chiefly from its California office, Algoworks is a leading DevOps consulting company which enables continuous delivery pipeline across the cloud platforms for faster time-to-market at reduced costs. The company’s key Salesforce Services include: Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine Services, Windows Azure, CI/CD Automation and Serverless Computing. For more information, contact us here.
Ajeet Singh
