10 Things Every Enterprise Should Realize About DevOps
Even though DevOps has been fairly adopted into the work culture of most cutting-edge software outsourcing services, there are still some myths floating around in the employee circles that affect the view of the top management towards DevOps.
With quantifiable results in delivery and operations like 30 times faster deployment times and 200 times shorter lead times, it is extremely important that the enterprise’s knowledge about DevOps is accurate and comprehensive. Half-baked assumptions about a popular-term may lead to disastrous implementation results, which may affect the revenue and reputation of the software outsourcing services.
Hence, we present the top 10 things to know about DevOps that will enable smoother functioning of the software development life cycle:
1. It is imperative that the top management believes in the potential of DevOps
IT industry veterans have backed DevOps as the most productive project development process – that thrives on inter-departmental cooperation. It is necessary that the importance of adopting DevOps should be made clear to the top management (mostly the CIO) and their knowledge should be more than just knowing the terminology associated with it. If this is achieved, the company realizes its full potential in terms of work speed and delivery quality.
2. Understanding DevOps exactly for what it stands
Other than the combination of two prevalent terms – development and operations, DevOps is a way of life for companies aspiring to reach their best potential. It is often misunderstood as the project implementation method that increases release speed and thrives on continuous delivery. Rather, it is about meeting the ever increasing expectations of customers and streamlining development by removing deployment hurdles.
3. DevOps is as much about business as it is about IT
Delivering quality projects on time and with continuous efforts to increase the usability of the application increases the business of the software outsourcing services. DevOps affects all areas of the company’s departments, as the revenues directly depend on the performance of their IT division. Also, no company is strictly an IT company or strictly a non-IT company anymore – there is an IT division in each firm and even IT firms are investing in areas other than just software.
4. The best implementation of DevOps when it becomes rooted in organizational culture
It is when the teams don’t feel that they are ‘collaborating’ outside their departments, that DevOps is said to be successful. The seamless integration of all teams that contribute to the project is achieved only when DevOps is implemented without the feeling of seeming like a process restriction. DevOps is about disrupting the inter-departmental red-tape and working in unison to provide the best customer service possible.
5. Successful digital transformation is possible only with DevOps
Every company has mandatory IT department now. Constant customer engagement and employee productivity is possible only with an extensive application suite that is always evolving. This is possible only with DevOps.
6. Companies have become conscious about metrics due to DevOps
Earlier, application performance was measured only with the amount of revenue it generated. Now, application performance is measured right from its development start to post-launch – through metrics like MTTR, MTBF, development-to-deployment lead times, active users, etc.
7. DevOps requires automation
Since DevOps aims to reduce hassles for the team, event handling should be automated to a larger extent by leveraging data analytics and monitoring solutions that can take actions based on the fluctuations in the logged data values.
8. DevOps requires solutions that aid feedback and feedforward cycles
The motto of DevOps is continuous evolution. Not only customer feedback after application launch, but also beta user feed forward during project development should be taken into account.
9. DevOps requires a modern approach to APM that provides situational awareness
The application performance monitoring solutions that are used by the DevOps teams should be able to recognize events like server downtime, user request overload, attempted DDoS attacks, etc. on top of just logging system performance in real time. This brings in situational awareness that is critical for a DevOps implementation.
10. Requires application analytics to improve software strategy
Application analytics were traditionally gathered after application launch. Now, application analytics are required to be logged and analyzed through a visual presentation of the data. This helps in formulating software strategy that will allow the software outsourcing services to effectively deploy quality applications within shorter spans of time.
