Falling into the DevOps philosophy is quite a lot of effort considering the various facets of management that need to be achieved to reach optimal delivery standards. These bottlenecks force organizations to shy away from embracing DevOps as the core of their developmental activities.
Since DevOps is not about an end-goal that can be achieved overnight through a set of implementations, and since it demands for gradual changes made at the granular levels, that’s affecting the present structure of the organization as a whole, practical guidances and thorough planning is implicitly relevant to achieving success in it.
Organizations struggle to scale through DevOps for many reasons. Though DevOps results in greater throughputs and better customer satisfaction, its implementation takes a long time. This is where DevOps as a Service has come to play a major role in placing organizations in the right paths, and directing them to make future substantial changes with well thought out Action plans.
Need for DevOps as a Service
While implementing DevOps, organizations need to rethink their software delivery processes, focus more on monitoring and security, whilst also training the IT department on using new tools and methodologies. The cultural shift brought on by a model that is showcased with the service adoption will have the bonus benefit of setting the road for future self-reliance inside the team.
Opting for DevOps as a Service will have the following benefits, as a result of the core principles associated with DevOps, and the additional backbone of support from a team of experienced folks, driving change from the outside:
Speed of Delivery
A primary concern for most companies, and specially for those that launch multiple products, or apps, or make multiple updates to products in a short span of time, is the time it takes for them to make a final deployment without issues. Since speed is at the crux of DevOps in rolling out products and updates, it is an ideal option in an ever-changing market place.
Speed is at the crux of DevOps, in delivering products and maximizing the agility of workflows. With increased storage, computing power and configuration tools to manage apps building, DevOps will increase product release velocity and efficiency. With the development and operations teams coming together to integrate their processes in a consistent and pre-planned manner, there will be lesser time spent on going back to find hidden issues, or revisit parts of the development due to the lack of visibility.
Not only does speed and agility improve drastically for building products and features, but it also improves the user experience with microservices, and regular updates through continuous delivery.
Management and Tools
75% of Fortune 500 companies are using DevOps tools in their software developments. The quicker turnaround time and better collaboration has seen great success in the popular industry, which is of no surprise owing to the use of advanced tooling, and management of workflows with complex techniques.
DevOps as a Service gives engineers more flexibility, because they can subscribe to any toolset of their choice, available at their fingertips on the cloud, without waiting for approvals and buying cycles. Tools for automation, configuration management, source-code management, testing and monitoring helps teams manage complex environments. DevOps tools have become more and more simple to use, giving better control to the engineers.
Since planning and management is also done from an easily available source in a DevOps as a Service model, the in-house team can easily relinquish some control, though not all. Flow of information is also under control, and a clear pipeline is established for any future use.
Performance of Product Release
Speed and ease of management may be achieved in product development and delivery, but the quality of the final product will be the determining factor in the product success. DevOps services integrate the best in class practices, that are thoroughly analysed and studied closely for years. If you have to look up to anyone for such an experience, it will be the DevOps as a Service team.
DevOps as a Service use will also lead to a data-driven approach towards a solution, not only for the operations team, but also from a development side, which will lead to better insight. This way, teams can analyse which feature, or which product release performed the best in the market.
The DevOps approach will also lead to better documentation, so that there is ample trace of past activities. The continuous testing, unit testing, and automated testing capabilities, and the continuous monitoring aids towards great performance and quality control.
Skills and Training
DevOps requires specialised expertise, and specified talent that is hard to find. Skills-scarcity drives companies towards the use of DevOps as a Service, giving fast access to a valuable niche of specialized engineers. Even if you do not have an in-house DevOps team, the present development team can seek to advance their skills in a DevOps-focused manner.
As the team will also have the exposure and availability of carefully selected toolsets with associated operations management systems, they will gain an experience and training to use them well. A dedicated DevOps team can bring in the talent, as well as the coaching necessary to run the entire operation successfully.
DevOps Services in a Nutshell
Audit and Assessment
The first part of DevOps implementation is identifying what amount of DevOps activities are already taking place inside the organization, knowingly or unknowingly. Services start with an audit and assessment of the present state of the organization. From ‘No DevOps’ to ‘Optimized DevOps’, the stages in a DevOps Maturity Model will be a guide to setting the right expectations, without trying to achieve everything all at once.
With the DevOps assessment and audit, software delivery processes are examined, and feasible solutions for optimization are suggested. They may include upgrading the technology stack, pipeline optimization, team structure reassignment, strategy road mapping, etc.
Continuous Integration and Automation
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of converging changes and controlling version history of software development code, on a regular basis that is seen as an ongoing process. This kind of regular integrations of code into the pipeline will facilitate regular testing and bug fixes on the code, as well as training automation models with the right tools.
A well-centred DevOps model will have Automation built into it. DevOps as a Service can bring in the best tools for automation, without heavy investments from the organizations. Automation will also aid Rapid Application Deployment (RAD), which is now possible with more reliability, when previously, reliability was a stumbling block to speedy deployment.
Automating processes have many benefits like, avoiding pitfalls through quick alerts, allowing for better operational activities to occur, saving valuable time, and lowering costs of operations in the long run.
Containerization and Orchestration
Managing cloud infrastructure and improving security has been a focal point for a while now after the last digital transformation. While cloud brought a lot of scalability, and flexibility, the issues faced with their use were also proving problematic. Containerization and orchestration technologies changed the way data and resources are shared, thus increasing security through isolation of apps.
Containerization enables rapid deployment, and segregation of configurations to suit individual container needs. With Orchestration tools, containerized applications can be effectively managed with advanced controls. These controls will implement load balancing, service discovery, resource allocation, cluster management and much more.
Monitoring, Logging, and Alerting
Post production and deployment, apps need effectual monitoring to scan for issues and bugs, external or internal threats. With user-needs and expectations constantly changing, regular updations and feature upgrades can lead to unprecedented problems in other parts of the code, or in operations and management. This is where regular monitoring, logging and alerting will help stabilize each app deployment. With larger expectations on data analytics, it is essential to use the latest analytics tools and technologies that will make automated self-alerting and self-healing systems.
Active monitoring will increase sustainability by capturing, categorizing and analysing important metrics and logs. It also has to happen 24/7, providing real-time analysis and insights. DevOps services will cover all these important markers for maximum output.
Collaboration
Emphasis on team structure and collaboration is at the core of a DevOps culture shift. Hence, DevOps as a Service will also have the same effect in unifying development and deployment operations teams, to find a fine balance in the working protocols. Ownership of the product is thus shared between the teams, and core responsibilities will ensure a successful cycle. There are varied tools used for team collaboration too, that provide visibility and acknowledgement among team members.
Information and data sharing are also part of this collaboration. Reporting and documentation may not be the most interesting aspects, but they will make the workflows better, and avoid confusion.
Microservices
Microservices will inevitably become part of the DevOps model, as it has been integrated into it to make applications load faster, and to enable quicker innovation. Microservices will break down large projects into small digestible chunks, thus facilitating developers to work on different parts of the product, without affecting the works of others.
Microservices cannot stand by itself, without continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) which can deal with the frequency at which the products are ready for deployment.
Security
Earlier, DevOps was thought to increase security risks due to the extensive use of apps and cloud infrastructure, however integrating Security into DevOps, has eliminated such doubts. DevSecOps, and Shift Left policies have transformed the way organizations think about security issues.
DevSecOps principles will integrate security into every part of the development process, inbuild automation into the process, and will provide constant monitoring capabilities.
Shift – Left entails security at the source code level, and mitigating those issues from the very beginning, instead of having to deal with them much later in the process of app deployments. This eases the burden on the developer as well as the operations team in terms of late bug fixing, and compatibility issues in the production environment.
DevOps Compliance and Security is also an integral offering of DevOps as a Service, and so organizations can make full use of those capabilities, with the industry best capabilities that come along with it.
Configuration and Infrastructure Management
For DevOps to make the necessary impact, not only does it need a restructuring inside the organizational teams, but also in the way they manage their infrastructure to be flexible to impending needs. Since DevOps concentrates on the product’s life cycle from build to deploy, these infrastructural needs should be met, not just by adding the extra bucks, but also the necessary skills and the know-how to configure these settings.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) stresses on the importance of integrating infrastructure management from the level of coding, so that the end deployment will run as smoothly as possible. Infrastructure configuration can be achieved at the code level these days, and they have been beneficial to operations, and development teams simultaneously.
IaC implements version control systems and continuous integration principles to achieve standardized infrastructure management. This way, changes can be made in a systematic manner, with the latest patches in the code, and the latest improvements.
The teams implement IaC and other infrastructural changes to prevent deployment issues, maintain a stable environment, and to ensure consistency in configuration.
Together, all the above-mentioned processes and practices help to transform organization structure and workflows, while instilling a new and better culture that ensures rapid development, smooth deployments, and flawless performance. Changes need to be aligned with the business needs, and be inclusive of every stakeholder with active participation. Gradually scaling up the intensity of these processes, the DevOps implementation becomes more and more optimized with changing user needs.
Innominds has a unique way of helping our customers fill into the most advanced DevOps models, with careful and well-thought-out planning and implementation. The DevOps ecosystem will drive changes from a granular level and up, with performance upgrades, and valuable resource allocation, expert advice, and strategic execution. Follow us through to develop a master plan, and let us ensure to take the full control of the situation with our in-house DevOps as a Service model.
