DevOps Implementation: All you Need to Know

Coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois, DevOps has become one of the most popular work cultures in the world. More and more organizations are implementing DevOps to improve work processes and results.

But here’s the thing— DevOps success doesn’t happen overnight. It needs continuous implementation to reap the benefits. However, when done correctly, DevOps can take the delivery of information technology to the next level.

In this article, we’ll talk about how to implement DevOps correctly to make the most of it. But before we start this, let’s talk a little more about DevOps and the basic details.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a blend of practices, tools, and cultural philosophies that automate and integrate processes between the development and IT teams. It aims to improve the pace with which organizations deliver IT services by adopting agile and flexible practices as part of a systems-oriented approach.

By bringing together different teams and establishing collaboration, DevOps builds an environment for bringing code to market faster, decreasing human error, improving version control, and reducing unnecessary costs— while enhancing resource management.

Importance of DevOps

The increasing worldwide adoption of DevOps is proof that DevOps is one of the best ways of ensuring the continuous delivery of applications and services to users. Here are some of the reasons why organizations need DevOps

Shorter Development Cycle

With DevOps, both departments— development and operations come together. This, in turn, becomes an advantage when it comes to new product launches and releases. As the teams start collaborating more, less time is wasted on unnecessary back-and-forth conversations and approvals.

Respond Faster to Various Needs

Most of the data projects are inspired by critical business concerns. Organizations need immediate resolutions, quick optimizations, and concrete results.

Fortunately, with the implementation of DevOps applications release time frame becomes short. This results in more flexibility to respond to business needs as they occur. Also, this decreases the initial time-to-market and gives time to make more modifications to improve the application.

Improved Resource Management

With DevOps, efficiency increases, which helps speed up the development process, reducing defects and errors. Today, some programs can automate DevOps tasks and, in turn, reduce the need for manual labor. So to put it simply, as most of the tasks can be automated, the developers get time to focus on other important tasks that can’t be automated.

Implement a Data-Driven Culture

DevOps is neither a collection of best practices nor a set of methodologies. It’s more of a principle of efficiency in which the organization associates development and operations for product development. This fastens the production of the project. Also, it allows for breaking down silos, adding agility, improving collaboration, and diversifying expertise.

Further, DevOps is essential for organizations that want to leverage their data and grow. For instance, in an organization, DevOps is crucial for deliver-production-ready data. DevOps teams can build an environment that focuses on data exploration and visualization.

Some of the other reasons why DevOps is important are:

What to Expect and Not Expect From DevOps

There is a lot of confusion that hovers around what DevOps is and what it’s not. In order to clear up the confusion, we’ll talk about what we can expect from DevOps and what we can’t.

Starting with what to expect from DevOps

Communication Between The Teams

The adoption of DevOps boosts communication between the developers, QA engineers, and system administrators so that they can be in alignment with each other. This helps the organization to prepare and take new applications to the production stage and reduce the number of bugs.

Lesser Application Failures

As different teams start to work together, identifying and then remediation issues in the final product becomes a seamless process. This means there would be no situations when the application works fine in the testing phase but fails after the production phase.

New Infrastructure

To fasten the process of delivering new infrastructure for development, testing, and production, a DevOps team can apply the IaC approach. Now with this, an infrastructure exists as a ready-made code; any developer can pick it up to develop an infrastructure for a new project. This way, they won’t have to wait before the system administrators provide them with new infrastructure.

Automation

Many repetitive steps, like unit testing, app compilation, and testing of applications in different phases, should be automated. Developers and engineers should spend time on coding and testing simultaneously and save time. In a DevOps environment, most of such tasks get automated.

Continuous Monitoring

With DevOps, organizations can constantly monitor the application performance and make necessary changes to meet the end goals.

Improved Trust

With a DevOps approach, testing and implementation become integral to the entire development process. To convince users about the application quality, it’s imperative to show them how focused your organization is on quality assurance. Here, the organization can make the users a part of their development process. And when you show, you involve them and prove that your product comes with quality assurance.

So these are the things you can expect when implementing a DevOps approach. Now here’s what you shouldn't expect from DevOps

DevOps Doesn’t Only Mean Automation

While automation plays an important role in adopting a DevOps process, it’s not the only thing that comes with DevOps. So, if you think DevOps ends with automation, you’re highly mistaken.

DevOps Tools Is Not Equal to DevOps

DevOps tools can help you build a better process, but that isn’t the end. There are several DevOps tools that you may need while adopting them. But these tools must be combined with some practices and policies to adopt a DevOps approach properly.

No Need to Redesign Organizational Structure

Most organizations think that implementing DevOps would need them to restructure their work process, making them hesitant to implement it. The fact, there’s no need to redesign the organizational structure. Train the existing employees, test, and iterate the process on the go.

So this was all about what to expect from DevOps and what not to, and now we can move forward with the next section.

Steps to Implement DevOps

Knowing about DevOps isn’t enough. You also need to implement it in order to reap the benefits. Here’s a step-by-step guide on DevOps implementation in your organization.

Step 1: Change the Mindset

You need to make up your mind to do anything, and implementing DevOps also starts with the same step. In order to implement an effective DevOps culture, follow these tips:

This can feel daunting at first, but with the right guidance, this can become a very productive step toward your organization’s growth.

Step 2: Scrutinize Your Current Work Process

Implementing a DevOps approach means you want to improve your work process for maximum efficiency. In order to achieve this, you first need to scrutinize your existing business processes for the following reasons:

Step 3: Make the Process Developer-Centric

The primary goal here is to improve the user experience and help your users achieve more with your products. So it’s always a good idea to keep collecting feedback from your developers about how you can improve the process for them. You can also ask them what else they would like to see in your products. Based on their feedback, you can change your processes.

Step 4: Build a Team

Implementing DevOps requires people who can implement it in their work processes. So you’ll need people like:

All of them together can help you

Step 5: Automate Wherever Possible

Automation is one of the core components of a DevOps environment. So when you start implementing DevOps, you need to befriend automation. Automation helps you to improve the speed of your software development process without affecting the application quality. There are plenty of repetitive tasks that can be automated. So add automation wherever possible.

Step 6: Pilot your DevOps Strategy

Automating processes isn’t the end of implementing DevOps; there are more things that you would need to do. In this step, you would need to implement the complete DevOps approach in your workflow with Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices and tools.

The idea here is to break down silos to enable collaboration and communication between development, operations, QA, and security teams and leverage user feedback to improve the process and the product.

Step 7: Keep Monitoring

In order to measure the effectiveness and how it can be improved, you need to track down some key metrics. The metrics can be deployment frequency, regression rate, error rate, etc. Keep monitoring the results to implement new solutions continuously.

DevOps Implementation RoadMap

In order to implement DevOps, you may need a road map. Here’s a road map to help you implement an effective DevOps culture.

Introduce the DevOps Approach

In order to implement DevOps, you first need to introduce the approach as a part of your organization’s IT activity to facilitate requirements like investments, resources, and more. Based on that, changes are made to your development and operations teams and activities, and a manager designs a DevOps strategy and starts monitoring the implementation.

Develop a DevOps Strategy

Your program manager must align the teams in a collaborative environment by setting common goals. Using this approach, all the team members get a sense of duty and responsibility. Some best practices that facilitate new development ways, infrastructure, testing, and improving team performance are crucial elements of the DevOps environment.

The idea here is to focus on two goals— focusing on the continuous release of production-ready processes and enabling the rest of the team to perform their best.

Containerization

Containerization of applications is a rapidly evolving technology. It makes your applications easily executable and lightweight.

The containerization of applications improves the reliability of the application as it goes through operations. Moreover, the container portions of the program make it independent of the overall infrastructure. This, in turn, boosts the application’s ability to run in any environment on its own.

Integration of Infrastructure with CI/CD Tools

Integrating infrastructure automation tools like Ansible, Kubernetes, and Chef with CI/CD tools like Jenkins, Bamboo, or GoCD can resolve many effective configuration management and deployment issues.

These tools help to set up containers to take risks through regular monitoring and continuous software updates.

Test Automation and QA-Dev Alignment

To achieve better and faster delivery, you need sufficient automated testing. However, not each testing type needs to be automated. Before automating any tests, calculate the number of iterations each test needs. This way, you’ll know whether automating a test is worth it.

On the contrary, QA-Dev alignment is critical to handle launch issues. This alignment helps to detect errors early and enables developers to eradicate issues before the next release.

Monitor Application Performance

Monitoring the application performance allows the DevOps team to spot issues that arise in the software development life cycle. It also lets them spot defects, prioritize them, and remove their root cause.

Aspects that Decide DevOps Success

With the help of DevOps practices, organizations ensure faster and more regular product updates offering users a friendly approach and redefining software delivery. Here are some key ideas for ensuring DevOps success:

Continuous Integration

By enabling this, organizations can detect issues early, recover faster from failures, assure quality, and lessen the turnaround time before the product is released.

Continues Delivery

This practice helps ensure software update releases are phased and reliable. Through this, organizations reduce deployment risks and initiate the process with high accuracy.

Microservices

With this, tools are used to address configuration or scripting problems that can help assure effective deployment and scaling.

Infrastructure as a Code

Here you use enhanced resource management through optimal-priced implementation with real-time deployments.

Configuration Management

Configuration management means using a platform automation service that helps instant configuration, establishes a single to manage all the operations, improves the quality of the code, and ensures the timely activity of report management.

Policy as a Code

Codification of infrastructure allows organizations to monitor, track, improve, and reconfigure the infrastructure in an automated procedure. A cloud environment allows controlling resources while continuously monitoring their security and ensuring compliance.

DevOps Implementation Benefits

But why should you implement DevOps? Are there any benefits of it? Let’s explore the benefits of DevOps implementation.

Better Collaboration

DevOps is about collaborating between various teams to achieve a common goal and improve business performance. With this approach, your organization improves collaboration and gets better results.

Improved Performance

When teams collaborate more effectively, they perform better. This is because the unnecessary time invested in getting approvals and discussions gets cut. All the teams follow the same route, share responsibilities and duties, and achieve the goals together.

Better User Experience

It’s all about improving the user experience. With a DevOps approach, the software development process gets faster, which allows for accommodating volatile market conditions and user preferences. This, in turn, improves the user experience.

Fewer Expenses

With the adoption of DevOps and proper collaborative efforts, organizations can minimize the costs of the departments as both maintenance and new updates are unified into one area of consideration.

So this was all about the benefits of adopting DevOps.

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