This is a complete guide to transforming your business using DevOps.
In this guide, you will learn how to:
- Get started with DevOps
- Adopt DevOps practices successfully
- Support a DevOps culture in your business
- Choose what to automate
- Choose the right DevOps tools
- Embrace continuous learning
- Lots more
Let’s begin!
What Does DevOps Mean?
DevOps is a short form for Development and Operations. It is a highly collaborative, cross-discipline approach that merges software development (Dev) with IT operations (Ops). It focuses on optimizing value delivery, cost, and risk on behalf of the customer across the entire software product value stream. In contrast to traditional approaches, DevOps fosters a culture of collaboration and quick adaptation to change.
Core Principles and Practices of DevOps
How DevOps helps meeting customer value?
Collaboration and Communication
DevOps fosters collaboration and communication between development, operations, and other teams, as well as quality assurance and security. This facilitates the removal of traditional obstacles and enhances workflow as a whole.
Automation
Automation is a vital aspect of DevOps practice. Automation improves outcomes by removing human variability and errors (for example, eliminating human handoffs or manual processes), thus making activities more consistently repeatable. For example, automation can enable teams to automatically provision, configure, and deploy development and test environments to validate changes to the product.
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous Integration (CI) entails regularly integrating code updates from several developers into a shared repository. Automated tests ensure the new code doesn’t interfere with already-existing functionality. This procedure aids in identifying and resolving problems early in the development cycle.
Continuous Delivery (CD)
Through deployment process automation, CD advances continuous integration (CI). Code is automatically deployed in a controlled and repeatable manner to different environments (stage, production) after passing through continuous integration tests.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as Code uses code and automation tools to manage and provision infrastructure (servers, networks, and databases). Infrastructure configurations are made consistent and repeatable as a result of this.
Monitoring and Feedback Loops
Applications and infrastructure are continuously monitored in real-time, according to DevOps. Faster problem detection and resolution are made possible via feedback loops, which offer insights into performance, customer behavior, and prospective problems.
Why should you use DevOps in Your Business?
5 benefits of implementing DevOps:
1. Enhanced Team Collaboration and Communication
Developers, IT operators, business executives, and application stakeholders collaborate through DevOps methods to ensure that software is planned, produced, tested, deployed, and managed to benefit your customers and your business.
One of the best examples of how DevOps can enhance collaboration is Netflix.
The organization established a “DevOps Culture,” where interdisciplinary teams collaborate well. Teams are empowered by this method to work together to create features, innovate, and maintain services.
2. Faster Time-to-Market
Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and other DevOps technologies provide regular updates for you and can assist in streamlining the development process.
For instance, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which implemented code at an astounding average rate of 11.6 seconds, has facilitated quick innovation and customer responsiveness.
3. Reduced Manual Errors
Errors and inconsistencies frequently result from manual deployment process interventions. DevOps automation reduces these risks by establishing consistent and repeatable deployment processes. Human error was the primary cause of frequent delays on the e-commerce platform Etsy. They saw an improvement in overall stability and a 90% decrease in disturbances related to deployment after integrating DevOps and automation.
4. Effective Resource Utilization
Traditional infrastructure provisioning may result in wasteful use of resources and higher expenses. DevOps supports infrastructure such as Code (IaC) and cloud-based infrastructure. For instance, Airbnb, a global network for lodging, optimized its infrastructure expenses through effective resource management and DevOps approaches, saving millions of dollars.
5. Rapid Experimentation
With regular releases, DevOps facilitates quick experimentation, discovering new issues and fixing current defects. As a result, your business is better equipped to adapt to shifting consumer needs, market trends, and competitive challenges. To maintain its technological leadership for its products, Google uses DevOps to innovate and continuously provide new features to its customers.
Getting Started With DevOps
When launching a DevOps initiative for your business, ask yourself these questions:
- Why is DevOps needed?
- What specific business goals will DevOps address?
- Does the amount of change demand surpass its capacity?
- Do changing business requirements call for rapid innovation?
Your responses will assist in matching your business goals and objectives with DevOps practices and principles.
How to Successfully Adopt DevOps
To adopt DevOps in your business, you must examine the five keys to success. These five keys are:
- Focus on Business Outcomes (We are all “the Business”)
- Change the Culture (Go from “Me” to “We”)
- Adopt Agile Development (Deliver Working SoftwareFrequently)
- Implement Automation and Tooling (Deliver Working Solutions Frequently)
- Embrace Continuous Improvement (See Problems as Opportunities)
Focus on Business Outcomes (We are all “the Business”)
It is important to note that DevOps is about delivering business value, not IT-centric goals.
Therefore, your focus as a business owner should be on delivering valuable, consumable solutions — answers, products, and outcomes
that satisfy stakeholders’ needs and wants.
Despite what many would have you believe if you can’t meet your consumers’ needs, regular releases are useless. Similarly, it would be a waste to establish a capability to distribute modifications numerous times a day if your consumers do not demand regular updates. DevOps’s maturity measures your team’s ability to deliver what customers want and when they want it.
Change the Culture (Go from “Me” to “We”)
DevOps is a cultural movement as much as a set of tools and processes. Therefore, you need to support a DevOps culture.
Here’s how to support a DevOps culture in your business:
- Align objectives and incentives across all teams to remove friction.
- Put teams together as much as possible so that people see each other as individuals rather than “those people.”
- If putting them together is impossible, you can choose communication tools that enable teams to collaborate effectively.
- Enhance empathy by making other teams’ metrics and measurements more transparent and widely available. For instance, you can add development data like build failures to the monitors in the operations areas and operational metrics like page loading time to the monitors in the development areas.
Adopt Agile Development (Deliver Working SoftwareFrequently)
To realize a positive return on investment for adopting DevOps, your development
teams must be able to deliver working software frequently.
Due to the many handoffs between teams, staff, and resource availability, the traditional waterfall delivery approach does not support frequent delivery. The outdated serial development techniques have been superseded by rapid modernization and customers’ growing demand for dynamic solutions. Gathering requirements, creating the software, and testing it all require an incremental and iterative method so that the team can receive customer input.
Therefore, you will need agile engineering practices, like test-driven development, continuous integration, and automated acceptance testing, to deliver working software frequently. According to a 2021 report, “80% of teams with high test coverage reported high customer happiness, compared to just 30% of those with low test coverage.”
Implement Automation and Tooling (Deliver Working Solutions Frequently)
Opportunities for automation span the entire DevOps continuum. However, automating everything is not feasible. You will need to choose what to automate.
When choosing what to automate, you should ask if automating the process will:
- Increase the speed of delivery by reducing defects due to human error.
- Reduce the reliance on subject matter experts (SMEs) by enabling anyone with permission to execute the process.
- Enable staff to work on valuable tasks by reducing the toil of manual efforts.
- Minimize delays due to processes that involve multiple people.
- Increase testing capability by automating tests as part of the continuous integration process.
- Provide documentation for a critical process.
There is also no single DevOps tooling vendor, so you will likely have to integrate tools from different vendors to meet your needs.
To choose the right tools, start with these four criteria to narrow down the list of choices:
- What operating system is the application going to run on? Similarly, what operating system is the application being developed on?
- What programming languages are being used to develop your applications?
- What is the domain of the application?
- Who will use the tool? What are the use cases?
Embrace Continuous Improvement (See Problems as Opportunities)
The most important characteristic of high-performing teams is that they are never satisfied and always strive to improve. To be successful in your business, you have to embrace continuous learning.
Steps to Embracing Continuous Learning
- Stop trying to be perfect. Striving for perfection leads to “analysis paralysis,” where nothing gets accomplished.
- Change your focus from failing (”fail fast” approach) to learning (”learn fast” approach)
- Support and promote a culture of continuous experimentation in your business
Understanding Continuous Experimentation for Your Business
Continuous experimentation is integral to any learning process and is also essential for the adoption of DevOps. It enables your DevOps teams to learn to identify and solve their problems. This process enables your team to deliver business value while limiting risk as the team develops new skills and capabilities.
Continue with your DevOps transformation using a progressive, iterative approach that uses quick cycles of experimentation.
Improvement Kata: A Key to Continuous Improvement
One framework you can use to help navigate your continuous DevOps journey is the improvement kata. A kata is “a routine you practice deliberately, so its pattern becomes a habit.” The improvement kata is a repeating four-step routine by which your business (or team) improves and adapts. It makes continuous improvement through the scientific problem-solving method of plan-do-study-act (PDSA) a daily habit.
The improvement kata prescribes these actions:
- Understand the direction or challenge.
The direction is derived from the vision set by your organization or product owner.
- Understand the current conditions.
You must understand where you are before choosing an appropriate next target.
- Understand where you are.
You must observe and note what is happening. Use your team’s metrics to make
an honest assessment of the current state.
- Establish a target.
The target condition consists of a description of the process to be addressed, the date by which you aim to achieve the condition and measurable acceptance criteria for the new process.
Note: Do not do any planning for how you will reach the target condition.
- Iterate toward the target.
You cannot know in advance how you will reach the target condition. The team finds the right path through a series of experiments and retrospectives. Retrospectives provide an important opportunity for agile teams to
improve.
As you embark on your journey to develop a DevOps capability, use continuous improvement processes to keep moving forward and to help you make the right choice.
Conclusion
As a business owner, you should always remember that DevOps is never “done” — it is a
continuous process for improving the delivery of business value. Adopting DevOps practices and principles allows your business to become more inventive, efficient, and agile.
It becomes possible to achieve continuous improvement, which enables you to provide outstanding goods and services that go above and beyond for customers. Begin your DevOps journey now to realize the full potential of your business!
Now I’d like to hear from you
Do you have any questions or suggestions regarding implementing DevOps into your business? You can share your opinions in the comment section below!
FAQs
What are the challenges with implementing DevOps?
The challenges are in two categories. There are challenges faced when adopting DevOps and challenges preventing the scaling (increased use) of DevOps.
The first category of challenge is related to the organizational change required to remove the traditional business and IT silos that constrain your delivery of business value. It includes:
- Developing required skills for delivery staff.
- Ensuring quality.
- Obtaining business input and support.
Challenges encountered with scaling DevOps efforts highlight the need for continuous improvement and a learning environment that enables everyone to expand their knowledge and develop the skills to be effective in a DevOps organization. It includes:
- Dealing with legacy systems.
- Organizational learning.
- Organizational change related to IT.
What is the best DevOps tool?
There is no best DevOps tool. There is no single DevOps tool that does everything needed to plan, build, test, secure, provision,
configure, deploy and monitor the solutions your team creates. Implementing DevOps
tools will not fix broken or poorly designed processes and missing practices; it may worsen things.