DevOps in Kitchen English

History has showed us that the traditional way for delivering business applications was not meeting the needs of our business partners and customers.  How?

• Slow time to market
• Customization difficulties
• Slow introduction of new technology 
• Instability with our applications & environment
• Cost Over-run

Over a decade ago we saw the rise of nimbler development practices. These practices evolved to solve the problems that we had been experiencing for decades.

• The business creates a series of requirements
• Requirements turned over to development 
• Wait for the product to be delivered

Many things could go wrong with this approach such as requirements change or that what was delivered, while technically matching the requirement, did not meet the true requirement(s). Creating agile teams that included the business, development and quality assurance resources into a single unit helped deliver the desired requirements that meet the business needs, quicker and with higher quality.  This was accomplished by breaking the requirements down into smaller deliverables which would be be developed, quality assured, validated, delivered and validated that they met the business need prior to moving on to the next piece of the larger requirement.

We have heard a lot of new terms being weaved into our normal day to day vocabulary. One of the more interesting of these new terms is DevOps. DevOps is the next evolution in our software delivery methodology. We need to remove the wall that exists between operations and development. We need to include our operations teams into the software development process to ensure that we are delivering a product that is properly prepared to operate at the scale and reliability that the business expects.  These operational characterizes should have been explicitly documented very early in the SDLC process and validated thru the quality tollgates that are in place within the agile or waterfall process which you choose to leverage.

Prior to implementing DevOps principles companies used different degrees of automation, procedures and methods to build the application, migrate the artifacts between development/testing environments and ultimately into production. Each step increased the implementation risk due to human error, environmental differences and inconsistencies in the processes that were followed.

Simply put DevOps methodology focuses on three key factors –

• People that are trained to work across traditional operational boundaries
• Processes focus on creating a streamlined approach to the build and migration of artifacts between the environments that meet the organizations regulatory / statutory requirements
• Technology that supports the implementation of the processes so that they are repeatable, automated and self documenting, mitigating the risk of human error.

Next up:

DevOps and Waterfall – are they mutually exclusive?