Progressively organizations are adopting the practices of DevOps to streamline software development, increase developers’ productivity, and improve continuous delivery workflows. However, this approach offers more flexibility for the teams. In that case, it can quickly create silos of data and communication within the organization, which systematically harms the quality and speed of application delivery. Managers often need more visibility and lighting on the daily life of the development teams, the opportunities for automating DevOps pipelines, and ways to improve the reliability and resilience of the applications in new environments that are cloud-native.
This is where artificial intelligence (AI) takes up space. AIOps (or AI and advanced analytics applied to
IT operations) has transformed the management of systems complex in business. Based on these
same principles, organizations can adopt a more innovative DevOps approach, namely AIOps approach to DevOps practices that leverage AI throughout the software development life cycle. DevOps can transform the company with tactics and technology complements such as SRE (Site Reliability Engineering).
To better grasp the transformative potential of DevOps practices, we will take you through the basics and the growing role of the DevOps services company. Alongside DevOps best practices and the associated key metrics that can transform development and software deployment.
DevOps designates a flexible framework of practices for software development and delivery
companies to align and coordinate developer initiatives (Dev) and IT operations (Ops).
The easiest way to represent DevOps remains an infinite loop. No more disparate processes:
Operational and development teams are part of a continuous cycle that includes the
planning, coding, builds, testing, release, deployment, operation, and monitoring of
apps and services. This uninterrupted workflow allows teams immediately identify and resolve
legal and functional issues upstream to eliminate them all before going into production.
Recent advancements in cloud-native technologies, open-source solutions, and flexible APIs have furtherenhanced the effectiveness of DevOps. Anchored in Agile methadology, DevOps perfectly meets the needs of teams in the context of accelerating development and application launch models, such as
continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines.
Basics of the DevOps approach
The DevOps culture is based on a vision, a plan, management support, and close collaboration
to integrate development methods and application delivery. By adopting some essential practices, teams can improve their efficiency and mastery of their workflows, tools, and processes to deploy better software faster.
As part of a DevOps approach, it is essential to carry out tests at all stages of the software development cycle. These continuous tests involve many stakeholders: the development team, quality control, operational team, etc. This is to assess software quality at each stage of the delivery cycle. In
addition to eliminating faulty code very early on, these tests provide rapid and continuous feedback to
development teams to enable them to resolve any quality issues.
If scaling continuous testing proves essential, the manual validation of the test results derails the delivery process. It’s there that constant validation comes into play to automate the process of evaluating the results from predefined service level objectives to compare data from dashboards or checkboxes in a spreadsheet; verification continuously eliminates manual analysis. For example,
DevOps teams can set thresholds for quality to apply criteria automatically presets and prevent incorrect code from progressing to the next stage.
Here are five scenarios explaining the future of DevOps cloud-based solutions and automation in an organization:
#1: DevOps is not about pipelines and automation
Even today, many people cling to the idea that DevOps is about continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. But with this perspective, it is more difficult to identify bottlenecks in the value chain beyond coding and deployment.
Rather than considering DevOps as a silo in the organization, it would be relevant to see it as part of a more significant flow of value-generating activities. The value stream also gives you a broader vision of optimizing the company’s activity.
#2: Visibility Helps Identify Problems and Build Consensus
The concept of visibility promotes examining a problem using different resolutions. Let’s take the example of a bottleneck that arises in the deployment, and each DevOps team member comes up with another reason to explain the cause. This helps us zoom in and look at the steps at a finer level to determine where the real cause of the problem lies.
A value stream map that inspects the problem at different scales can highlight where the waste is happening. In addition, collaborating to draw such a map encourages all stakeholders across the organization to share a common vision.
#3: Measurement to establish an optimization strategy
The measure does not have to be expensive; it all depends on what you measure and how you do it. A good starting point can be the measurement of time. (How long does it take to complete a step? How long does one resource have to wait for another?) To know what to measure, you must look beyond the CI/CD.
For example, based on the DORA measurement system: the frequency of deployment, the average time to implement changes, the average time to restore, and the failure rate of changes are measured. These four measures indicate where attention to the process is needed. Incorporating a value stream approach adds a layer above the data to help determine how to improve the opportunities that the metrics have highlighted.
#4: Value must be added at every step
Enabling engineers to understand the value stream aligns goals and shows how their work contributes to business performance. This way, it is possible to ensure that limited resources are always devoted to solutions that bring value.
But how to define the value? It is a complex subject. Some say it measures effort, quality, cost, or time, but an agreement does not exist and probably never will. Instead, you need to think in terms of what customers find valuable. Step or individual artifact in the value stream? And how do you add value at each stage? These questions help align team efforts and highlight the differentiation between business, employee, and customer value.
#5: Streamline processes
Software complexity increases as systems become more sophisticated. Each process is its little torrent, with its bottlenecks blocking the flow. And each small stream has its points of entry and connection with other streams in a larger perspective. Integrating value stream considerations helps to think about how the value streams of various products (platforms, web applications, mobile applications) are connected and how a bottleneck in one of them impacts the others.
The goal of every company and every computing leader is to simplify the development of apps and services. These best practices and emergent technologies make it possible to develop code, services, and critical applications efficiently. Moreover, by leveraging these new tools, you can
offer a more proactive and normative development architecture that can respond to the demands of the digital age.
DevOps processes break down silos, drive collaboration, and improve team feedback loops. The transversality of links and coordination reduces delivery times since it allows teams to automate old manual processes such as monitoring, evaluation testing, and remediation. This automation will enable teams to develop self-service models to accelerate delivery pipelines and extend DevOps processes across the organization.
Summing Up
Today, the objectives of companies pass necessarily through digital transformation.DevOps allows organizations to evolve their culture and modernize their software’s creation, management, and security. In addition, DevOps unifies development and operations in a framework that breaks down silos and promotes collaboration throughout the life cycle. In this environment, organizations can implement procedures that guarantee software systems’ availability, low latency, performance, and resilience in the same vein. DevOps cloud-based solutions practices align and automate development, testing, delivery, and deployments.
Through continuous automation and the precise identification of the root causes, Cloud Consulting Service companies enable organizations to harvest the fruits of DevOps fully and simplify the cloud. Accelerated innovation, more collaboration effectiveness, and application security integration into emerging DevOps solutions. Cloud Consulting Service companies provide precise answers at each software development and delivery stage. Once you embrace this framework, you will see opportunities to reduce bottlenecks and improve value everywhere in your organization.
