Many organizations today are striving to improve the delivery process to take it to the next level. A successful DevOps implementation is imperative to achieve this goal. However, the question is where to start with DevOps implementation and how to make it a success?
There is a lot of information about DevOps, still there is a lack of information about the specific steps to take to implement it and make it a successful way to accelerate software development and operations. What is DevOps business value?
However, DevOps implementation is still a challenge for many companies that struggle with more than just software development.
Adopting DevOps can shorten the time it takes to deliver high-quality, fast, and highly reliable software. By fostering a culture of cooperation and collaboration among all parts of the organization.
Moreover, according to a research report, the global DevOps Software market expects to reach $6.6 billion by 2022.
Many people have a basic understanding of how to make an implementation successful. But others don’t have a thorough understanding of how to use it in a way that accelerates software development and operations.
This article briefly describes what DevOps is, the reasons for implementing DevOps, its value, and how to realize the DevOps implementation plan.
What exactly DevOps is?
A development or “dev” team traditionally compose of people in the IT industry. In the IT department, a separate team, called IT operations, was responsible for supporting IT.
Both teams were responsible for leading continuous integration, had separate responsibilities, and had separate goals to meet. Often the team works on separate floors and rarely communicates with each other. Because of these “silos,” there was little communication and collaboration between these teams – a rigid barrier that they only crossed when needed.
DevOps has succeeded in breaking down these silos and getting Dev and Ops teams to collaborate, share responsibility, and take full ownership of the software they deliver throughout its lifecycle.
DevOps helps create a stable operating environment by delivering software in a much shorter timeframe with fewer errors and bugs, promoting version control, and optimizing costs through continuous integration. Read about DevOps implementation from scratch and to implement DevOps.
Implementing DevOps practices leads to better, faster, more efficient, and higher-quality software. As it leverages the expertise and skills of all functional team members to be more effective and productive.
Benefits of DevOps?
There are many reasons why organizations should immediately adopt DevOps practices and drive the Software Delivery process. Below, we’ve listed a few key reasons:
● Renew customer focus
● Optimize your business completely
● Improved market penetration
● Satisfied customers
● Reliability
● Collaborative improvement
How do I start implementing DevOps?
The first thing we need to do is identify all the gaps and bottlenecks in your organization. Mapping value streams is a good place to start.
● How many steps are there between a customer’s request for a product or service and the delivery of the corresponding value to the customer?
● What is the duration of each step? Is there waste and unnecessary waiting?
● Are there plans for an update?
● When is a new idea from a customer (internal or external) implemented and usable?
Metrics-based process mapping and value stream mapping are tools you can use to answer all of these questions.
Through these exercises, you can think about gaps and latencies that exist between different parts of an organization and between different parts of a software development team. The goal of DevOps is to close those gaps and reduce those delays.
To effectively start with the DevOps methodology, you should focus on the following factors. Here’s what they are and why they’re important.
● Technology-based automation
● Organizational Culture
● Methods and practices
● Irradiate everything
● Continuously test, adapt and learn
How can I make my DevOps successful?
To successfully manage DevOps projects, follow these six approaches.
Process and discipline
Developing your product and moving it to production is essentially the same thing. Understanding the constraints, bottlenecks, and queues in your organization will help you identify the activities you need to focus on.
Identifying inefficiencies in your current delivery process allows you to make changes in your organization.
Releasing Rates
Any DevOps initiative must be based on your organization’s specific needs and not just limited to tool improvements. So, Don’t start a DevOps initiative until you’ve determined why it’s necessary.
Instead of just focusing on release rate and how to get things done faster, consider what business benefits it will bring. For example, an improved release rate could allow your team to innovate faster.
Collaboration
You can use collaboration to get input from the entire team to determine which areas to prioritize first for DevOps implementation and how DevOps can impact each stage of the development process.
Make sure you understand the data
Make sure your metrics are closely tied to your business goals. Does your company’s new product typically take more time to launch than the competition?
To determine this, you need to measure three things. The time between deployments, the frequency of deployments, and the recovery times. When implementing DevOps, it’s important to understand which parts of the process can have the biggest impact.
How DevOps is implemented within your Organisation?
Planning is essential before implementing a new methodology. There are a few steps that every organization should follow to implement DevOps
Ensure your team is competent
It is very important to identify resources before moving to new technology or implementing a new methodology.
An expert and professional team should entrust this task. The team is responsible for all phases of software deployment, starting from requirements gathering, planning the way to implement the requirements, and finally deploying and maintaining the software.
Begin with small steps
It is always wise to test out small prototypes before setting up any large DevOps setup. To see what the results are, a small configuration could be made and tested.
In any organization, before offering a DevOps solution to customers, implementing the DevOps methodology within the company is a good idea to understand how it works.
Use agile principles
To get the best results, companies need to adopt agile principles and DevOps methodologies. Analysts, developers, and testers will benefit from positive collaboration and be able to work together collaboratively.
With agile and DevOps methodologies, development time will be reduced and the number of defects will reduce, leading to improved product quality.
Feedback from the customer
The customer should be involved and engaged at every stage of the process, from requirements gathering to software delivery. It is also important that companies take extreme care to account for any changes in customer requirements and ensure that code is already written as efficiently as possible.
What are the best practices for successful DevOps implementation?
Here are some of the best DevOps practices you can use to successfully implement DevOps.
Understand your infrastructure needs:
Take the time to understand the application first and then align your goals with your infrastructure design, because DevOps implementation should be business-driven. Be sure to consider the following elements when understanding your infrastructure:
● The cycle time of a project
● Environments for testing
Create Continuous Testing and continuous deployment.
Better software quality is achieved through continuous testing. In the traditional software development process, code moves from the development phase to the testing phase and only moves to production if it passes testing. If it doesn’t, the code is sent back for modification.
Testing is an integral part of DevOps implementation, and quality assurance personnel are an essential part of the cross-functional DevOps team. As part of the delivery pipeline, testing is done repeatedly.
Performance benchmarking:
You should always run some performance tests and get a collective benchmarking report for the latest build that your team because this will only justify the quality of the build and the necessary infrastructure.
Communications & Collaboration:
Communication and collaboration are X-factors that enable organizations to grow and improve continuous delivery. The DevOps team can design culture more effectively when it collaborates with the business team and development team.
In turn, this can speed up continuous deployment development, operations, and even other teams, like marketing, so that all parts of the organization are aligned toward the same goals and projects.
Choosing Tools:
Be sure to choose tools that are all compatible with the rest of the toolchains you plan to use. There is a reason you need to be so careful since you must record each request captured. The tool increases the efficiency and performance of the system.
Don’t forget to keep documentation:
Make sure you document your entire DevOps strategy. This includes your process and infrastructure, as well as the reports, RCA (Root Cause Analysis), and change management.
By doing this, you can analyze whether all problems we encountered can be automated in our next cycle, or if there are any ways to handle them smoothly without impacting your production environment.
Keep an eye on cost-cutting:
Experiencing cloud billing many times has shown that if you don’t keep an eye on it, it will continue to grow, proportional to the growth of your business going forward until you decide that you want to optimize your usage. You should always audit your cloud computation every two months.
Final Verdict:
DevOps is not a simple solution; we recommend that you consider the time, organizational effort, and new technologies you will need to take the initiative a success before implementing it. Implementing DevOps can deliver software faster and with better quality without compromising on speed.
There are thousands of companies in the world that rely on DevOps strategy to deliver software faster without compromising on quality. Before deciding whether to implement an IT solution, it is important to determine the required technology, time, and organizational effort.
