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From startups to large enterprises, several organizations across different industries are adopting DevOps solutions & services to gain a lasting business advantage over competitors. Startups and small companies don’t carry the burden of legacy software, which allows them to quickly adopt new technologies and gain business edge. On the other hand, enterprises are finding it difficult to make the transition.
There are significant barriers such as less agility, financial barriers, demographics constraints in the ways of enterprises adopting DevOps. However, large enterprises are fast overcoming the barriers for DevOps transformation and adoption.
The DevOps momentum is occurring within all industry sectors, making it one of the core offerings of enterprise technology solutions. Several industries such as healthcare, finance, insurance and manufacturing sectors are spearheading the charge with DevOps to support their business transformation with a focus on agility and speed. Although many organizations are in the nascent stage, experimenting with single or multiple projects they all are transitioning toward DevOps across their entire enterprise.
DevOps is a “software development methodology that combines software development (Dev) with information technology operations (Ops). The goal of DevOps is to shorten the systems development life cycle while also delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives. The DevOps approach is to include automation and event monitoring at all steps of the software build.”
DevOps Toolchain
DevOps is specifically a cross-functional mode and not a single tool. There are sets of multiple tools. Such DevOps tools are indicative of key aspects of the development and delivery process.
- Code — Code development and review and source code management tools
- Build — Continuous integration tools
- Test — Continuous testing tools
- Package — Activities involved once the release is ready for deployment
- Release — Release approvals and automation. Deploying software into targeted environment
- Configure — Infrastructure configuration and management
- Monitor — Monitoring of application performance and end–user experience
DevOps in the Enterprise
Considering the complexity involved in large enterprises, it is essential to break the barriers created by silos where business units function and operate as individual entities to safeguard processes and information. According to a research report by Forrester, “organizations which have adopted automation across the complete lifecycle including continuous integration, continuous delivery and production deployment have experienced more velocity and quality.” Purposeful end-to-end automation is foundational to success especially as DevOps initiatives continue to scale and grow in terms of magnitude and complexity.
On the software development side there needs to be better collaboration to serve the IT business needs of the organization. The basic principles of DevOps include cohesive culture, measurement of metrics to validate success, automation and sharing.
Here are ways to accelerate your digital transformation by adopting DevOps
Create feedback loops to measure effectiveness
It is a common myth that DevOps is just about automation or faster deployment of code to the production. DevOps is not the magic wand or formula to success, resulting in immediate results. Organizations that fail to maintain a comprehensive view of the delivery process often don’t gain advantage. DevOps is about providing continuous feedback on all aspects from design, production, and development to product management. It is a journey about learning from mistakes, improving, making progress and growing.
Measure to validate success
Metrics continues to be the driving force for the success of DevOps program. As enterprises move towards DevOps, it is important to understand progress and focus on areas that require change or improvement. For instance, faster deployment without significant change in quality does not indicate success. Key metrics continue to drive decisions related to automation. Enterprise DevOps success depends on identifying right metrics. To begin with metrics should align to velocity and throughput.
Bring Security into the Fold Early on
Don’t make security an afterthought, instead integrate security-related issues early on in the development cycle from the word go. Security should be at the crux of DevOps strategy as it is the core feature. The key is proactive monitoring to detect irregularities or inconsistencies
in any layer of the architecture as opposed to waiting for alerts that tell you about possible crash.
Create a Shared Culture
Performance-oriented and collaborative culture forms cornerstone of success for DevOps in a company irrespective of the size of the company. It is about creating a performance-driven culture that thrives on trust, continuous deployment, and experimentation.
The goal should be delivering business agility and flexibility. It’s ultimately about delivering business value through software.
Conclusion
Enterprise DevOps adoption is different for each and every organization. However, it is crucial to follow DevOps implementation best practices and at the same time experiment to find out what works best.
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