DevOps at scale: Winning strategies for modern enterprises

Source:-jaxenter.com

DevOps is a word that has generated massive interest over the last few years among the software powered organizations and developers, yet many people don’t fully understand what it actually means. One thing is for sure, as cool as it sounds, DevOps is not some kind of top-secret developer army group, job profile, or even a tool. But it is a wonderful ideology that any firm can help itself to unite their tech crew and take the company to newer heights.

As different departments grow, communication becomes difficult between the teams, mainly Dev and Ops. Since communication is the key to avoid unproductive siloing, the DevOps movement started as a cultural phenomenon in order to bridge this gap between Dev and Ops. So firms started embracing DevOps principles to get everyone on the same page and create a sense of shared responsibility, and moving forward, firms believe that was the recipe for success.

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Where does DevOps come into the play?
DevOps is mostly related to automation. Through automation, it is possible, and firms try to reduce their transaction costs to nearly zero, basically, by getting the testing and deployments for free. This helps companies take benefit of smaller batch sizes of tasks. Smaller batches of tasks/jobs make it easy to understand, write code, commit to, test, review, and know when they are finished. These smaller batch sizes also contain less risk and variance, making them easier to deploy and, in case if something goes wrong, to debug/troubleshoot and recover from.

With DevOps best practices like CI/CD, it is easy to understand which code has created bugs and make possible corrections wherever necessary.

Just like lean development, through automation and agile practice, firms can get feature development very close to single-piece flow, and this provides value to customers quickly and continuously by delivering features as quickly as possible.

More traditionally, DevOps is referred to as a means to break down the walls of confusion and chaos between the dev and ops teams and smoothen the flow of communication. In the DevOps model, development teams develop new features, and operations teams keep the system more reliable for customers, stable and running smoothly. Whenever there is a requirement for new features, the development team introduces that feature into the system, which sometimes makes the system unstable and outage might occur, and this goes into the hands of the Ops team to handle the system and recover it to the stable state without affecting any customer. Hence, DevOps is required for the smooth flow of engineering efficiency hand overall growth; it’s more about trying to execute more frequent changes safely in a complex environment through continuous learning.

Today, we will see some important elements that help firms to embrace DevOps with ease.

Start a cultural shift, a DevOps initiative
This should flow from top to bottom, company management leaders should start the discipline of embracing DevOps. Usually, it is the CIO who should move the needle and make things start from scratch. A DevOps mindset is very crucial at this point to make sure the teams are all prepared for a change in the culture. Gartner predicted that through 2022, 75% of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations due to issues around organizational learning and change, there is also a big reason why DevOps efforts fail is that most of the organizational leaders don’t understand Agile and DevOps.

Leadership makes a huge impact on the organizational culture and its way of doing business, hence engineering leaders need to understand why this change is necessary and start a culture of collaboration, culture of experimentation and learning, and eliminate the blame game.

Train your people
Training is one essential aspect for team leads and the people involved under them so they understand what is DevOps, the fundamentals, and why it is important for the organization to embrace it. Training enriches knowledge, collaboration, and communication processes between the people working in dev and ops teams.

It helps them to get together and get their hands on and test the new technology practices and tools introduced. There are many group courses, boot camps, DevOps experts that can help people get trained in DevOps. It is the firm’s responsibility to set proper expectations and choose the right candidates to train their people.