Introduction

DevOps is a development strategy that emphasizes collaboration between software developers and IT operations staff. But there’s more to implementing DevOps than simply asking your teams to work together. 

The term DevOps was coined by Patrick Debois in the year 2009 who’s also popularly known as the “Father of DevOps.” The process consists of the following main stages:

1. Plan
2. Create/Code
3. Build
4. Test
5. Release
6. Deploy
7. Operate and
8. Monitor 

Here’s a guide to what it takes to implement DevOps successfully and the many different strategies for doing so.

Don’t Try to Do Everything at Once

It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you’re first getting started with DevOps. There is a lot of information out there, and it can be hard to know where to start. I recommend starting small and working your way up.

First, choose an area that is easy to automate, monitor, and communicate with end users. This will make it easier for you to show success early on and build momentum toward other areas of the business. For example: if you are automating deployments or setting up monitoring tools then maybe consider starting with something like deploying web applications or containerized applications (like Docker). These types of services typically have fewer dependencies than other types of systems such as databases, so they tend to be easier test cases by which we can measure our progress in implementing DevOps practices throughout our organizations.

Do What you Can, When You Can

The first thing to do is to get your team using the tools they need. Start with what’s available, and add more features as you get more comfortable. Don’t try to do everything at once; find one or two things that work for you, then move on to the next.

Employ Automation

The goal of DevOps is to increase speed, reduce costs and human error, and improve quality. That’s why automation is considered so important. Automation can mean different things in different contexts (automated testing and continuous integration are two common examples), but it generally refers to the use of software to perform specific tasks. This means that there will be fewer humans involved in development and production processes, which reduces costs while improving quality—all while increasing speed.

Start with Existing Tools to Develop Custom Solutions

It may be easier to start with existing tools than to develop custom solutions. If you’re just getting started, there are a number of open source projects and cloud services that can help you get up and running quickly. For example:

• DevOps automation framework Jenkins Stack: An open source project that manages the entire software development lifecycle. It includes tools for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), as well as for other common DevOps tasks such as testing, building, packaging, and deploying code. It supports several operating systems including Linux and macOS.

• Elasticsearch: A search engine based on Apache Lucene that provides full-text search capabilities for large volumes of unstructured data in real time across many servers. It’s used by many companies like Netflix or PayPal so they can index all their transactions happening within those entities very fast because of its ability to scale horizontally (that is adding more instances when needed).

Start with Tools that Amalgamate well with Your Culture

When you start your DevOps journey, it’s important to understand that you won’t be able to change everything at once. You can’t force your culture, processes, people, or technology to change; if they don’t align with the goals of DevOps and Agile development then they will impede its success.

Instead of trying to force these elements into a fixed mold that doesn’t fit how your business works today, look for tools that are designed specifically for software teams adopting Agile methodologies—and allow them room for growth as the team grows its capabilities over time.

Focus on Collaboration & Getting Best Brains When You Can

But finding and hiring these resources is not easy.

Luckily, there are several great options for getting help:

• Look for help from other companies that have implemented DevOps already. They’ll have learned some of the hard lessons already, and can give you advice based on their own experience.

• Consultants can also be a good option if you don’t have time to learn the ins and outs of DevOps on your own. They tend to know what questions to ask and where to look for answers; they’re also more likely than employees at other companies (who may be focused on their day-to-day jobs) because they’re motivated by money rather than just knowledge sharing alone.* Open source communities such as GitHub provide additional resources after learning how they work together through collaboration.* Training courses may be another option if you want someone else’s expertise in addition or instead of using an outside consultant.* Books such as The Phoenix Project offer an inside view into how one company implemented DevOps successfully; they’re often written by individuals who were involved with implementing it themselves rather than just observing from afar.

Automated Monitoring and Reporting

Automated monitoring and reporting is a key DevOps practice. In order to improve the quality of your software, you need to be able to measure how well it performs in production. The developers should be responsible for monitoring their code so they can quickly identify problems. They also need to have a strategy for collecting this data and implementing analytics tools that will allow them to understand what’s happening with their applications as they run in production.

The operations team should monitor its infrastructure because they are responsible for making sure everything runs smoothly on a day-to-day basis. This means collecting metrics about CPU usage, disk space usage, network bandwidth consumption, etc., as well as logging any issues that arise with applications so they can be addressed immediately.

Your business should monitor its bottom line by measuring how much revenue each new feature brings in relative to costs such as development time and maintenance costs down the road (including ongoing support). The ability to accurately measure these types of metrics allows teams within an organization or across multiple organizations working together on one project—such as those using microservices—to make better decisions about which features should take priority when building out their product roadmap based on financial goals rather than just focusing on technical debt reduction alone without regard for the bigger picture.”

Keep Your Customers Informed, They Might Not Like Surprises

Let’s say your organization is implementing a new code base for the entire web application. You know this will affect end users and that they won’t like it if they are surprised by the change.

You could warn them and give them time to prepare for the change, or you can wait until it goes live and then explains what happened, why it happened, and how they can help themselves get used to the changes.

One way to keep users informed would be through an email campaign where you send out calendar invites with instructions on how people should use their new tools as well as tips on how they might benefit from using these features once they are released into production (e.g., there will be a new search feature).

Start Small, Automate, Monitor Progress & Optimize 

The best strategy for implementing DevOps is to start small, automate, and monitor progress over time.

Start small: It’s easier to build up momentum when you start with a manageable scope. If you try to tackle your entire department or organization at once, it can be overwhelming and feel impossible. Instead of trying to implement DevOps across the whole company at once, focus on one project or team at a time.

Automate: There are many tools available that can help automate parts of your development process (continuous integration servers such as Jenkins or TeamCity), but there may be some things that don’t have any existing tools available yet—like setting up backups for production servers in AWS CloudFormation templates—so make sure those things are included in your automation plan before moving forward with anything else!

Monitor progress over time: Having metrics in place will allow everyone involved (including yourself) to evaluate how well things are going over time so we can make adjustments as needed along each step of our journey toward full devops automation!

Conclusion

We hope that you now have a better understanding of how DevOps can work for your organization. As we saw, the DevOps team is full of helpful resources and tools that can help you get started and keep going once you’ve made the initial transition. The key to successful implementation is starting with what you already know, and then iterating on it until it’s perfected. By doing so, you’ll be able to implement an effective DevOps strategy without breaking your budget or overloading your team with new responsibilities!

Featured Image: The Workflow of DevOps: Source: Pease, 2017. 

Author Bio:

Priya has about 7 years of experience in Market Research. Currently, she is working for Valasys Media, as an Assistant Manager – Content Strategist, which is amongst the top B2B Media Publishers across the globe. She has been preparing several personalized reports for our clients & has done a lot of research on market segmentation, cluster analysis of audiences & inbound methodologies. She has worked with government institutes as well as corporate houses in several projects. She possesses various interests and believes in a data-driven approach to problem solving. She holds a post-graduation in science also writes extensively on all things about life besides marketing, science, data science and statistics. She is a firm believer in higher realities and that there’s always more to life than we understand. She is a psychic healer and a tarot practitioner, who believes in a spiritual way of living and practices Yoga and meditation. When not writing you can find her enjoying music or cooking.