An implementation perspective of DevOps

When I first heard the term DevOps few years back I immediately gone to Google and searched for a definition. Over the years I have come across lot much meaningful definition of DevOps. I felt like it brought more clarity of thoughts when I tried to look “Why DevOps”. One important finding is this is not anything new but better the way it has been done to improve agility and quality.

Why DevOps– In today’s digital world speed and innovation are critical for the success of businesses. To be competitive in the industry it has become important for every company to correct and innovate on their products, define and prioritise conceptual solutions, translate that into software designs, develop, test, deliver and monitor quickly and continually. It is also key to have a happy and high performing team to achieve the results.

How do we make it happen?

It is a transformation to the way you work in terms of people, process and technology. 

How is it done today not everywhere but many organisations?

1. People - Multi disciplinary teams involved lacking end to end view and responsibility. At least for some management people clarity makes them insecure.
2. Process – Mostly waterfall and agile in some places but lack of end to end process visibility and governance
3. Technology – Lot of tools for continues integration and delivery but disintegrated without having a centralised deployment pipeline and coordinated tasks with defined objectives
4. Where do you want to be

1. Alignment of IT to business strategy and priorities to enable continues business product innovation and IT designs.
2. Development to be a continues process
3. Automated testing with limited human intervention
4. Software releases should be multiple times a week with improved quality
5. Better collaboration and a happy team

 What are the

 Continues Governance

1. 1. Ability to prioritize product corrections and innovation by business into IT requirements
   2. Translate requirements into conceptual software solutions quickly and continually
   3. Quick and continues release and environment planning
2. Continues Integration
   1. Ability to share code centrally, continually integrate with automated build
3. Continues Deployment
   1. Automated deployment of software across test and production environments
4. Continues Monitoring
   1. Pro-active software monitoring and feedback
5. Infrastructure
   1. Continues and quicker deployment of infrastructure
6. DevOps culture
   1. Remove departmental silos and bottlenecks ,Increase cross-team collaboration and transparency

• Steps to achieve
  • Assess the company
    • What are you trying to achieve and is it in alignment to your business aspirations
    • What are your business drivers and challenges
    • Identify key stake holders in business and IT
    • Current state
      • Assess the project life cycle methodologies
      • Assess the software development life cycle
      • Assess the IT service management processes
      • Assess the IT organisation, roles and responsibilities
    • Define maturity model , current level , Plans and Priorities

 DevOps enablement and transformation

People, process and technology applied across the key focus areas below,

• Continues planning
• Continues Integration
• Continues Testing
• Continues deployments
• Continues Feedback and Monitoring
• Release and environment management
• Change management

• Continual service improvement
  • DevOps Maturity measurement
  • CSI planning
  • CSI implementation
  • Measurement and reporting.

DevOps is a continual process and most critical thing is to understand the business and IT objectives and the ability to manage change within the organisation.