Four questions to ask about your DevOps strategy

Source – searchmicroservices.techtarget.com

There’s a lot of information about DevOps out there, making it hard to determine exactly what it means. However, there are still key principles you can stick to in order to achieve success through DevOps. Here are four questions that, according to our experts, you should be asking when thinking about your DevOps strategy.

1. Have we established a zone of business impact?

DevOps tasks should be clearly connected to the applications they support, and businesses should in turn identify the business processes those applications support. This lets organizations map out what is referred to as a zone of business impact for each DevOps process, and it’s a fundamental part of DevOps documentation. That way, as expert Tom Nolle points out in his piece on the connection between DevOps and enterprise architecture, the impact any DevOps strategy has on business processes — even if the impact is simply a risk of disruption — can be planned for ahead of time. This will also ensure that development teams understand the business process lifecycle, or even lifecycles, that their application may impact.

2. Are we deploying continuously?

Implementing continuous delivery means that changes to your application are created and deployed on an ongoing basis. If your apps are not being delivered continuously, it’s important to start thinking about building a continuous delivery pipeline for them by making sure that everyone involved in app development and delivery is working together. According to expert Chris Tozzi in his piece on applying DevOps principles to app modernization, part of this means ensuring you have the infrastructure tools in place to roll out changes quickly from development to production.

3. Are non-IT departments involved?

Everyone who plays a role in software delivery, including those not in the IT department, should be plugged into a project, advises Tozzi in his piece on DevOps principles to apply to software architecture. Those in customer support, legal and HR departments have a stake in software production. A DevOps-friendly environment should ensure these non-IT stakeholders can collaborate with developers and IT operations staff as needed. Otherwise, nontechnical issues could hinder continuous delivery efforts.

4. Are we going all the way?

Those who do not go all out in terms of cultural acceptance and fully transitioning to all the required tools are going to have a hard time adopting a DevOps strategy, says Twain Taylor in his piece on common mistakes made when transitioning to DevOps. Some of this, he says, involves making significant changes to your infrastructure, like transitioning from servers and virtual machines to containers.