Most businesses are on the path to adopting DevOps to address software delivery issues. Difficulties are related to cost, speed and quality. DevOps is based on solving these problems by combining development, operations, and activity automation. Even though DevOps often confirms the claimed benefits, there are several lessons that those who come to DevOps share for themselves.
Before discussing the do’s and don’ts of implementing DevOps, it’s important to understand what DevOps is. There are many different definitions, but let’s be succinct: DevOps is the interaction and automation of development, operations and quality control processes to create a culture of communication, process improvement and development of technologies and tools.
Automation is at the heart of this definition, allowing you to implement DevOps best practices and ultimately reap numerous benefits, including:
- Faster time to market and feedback
- Increasing customer satisfaction
- Increasing the ability to create the right solutions
- Higher product quality
- More reliable releases
- Productivity increase
- Reducing costs and risks
Other important factors include security, integrated tools, test and quality automation, agile thinking, a collaborative culture, and the continuity of everything: continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment of systems (continuous deployment).
Mistake 1 – Thinking Either-Or About People, Processes, or Technology
To solve the problems associated with the development and delivery of modern software, enterprises need to improve in three areas: people, processes and technology.
People and processes are closely related as processes and systems define organizational culture. For example, disparate processes lead to a sharp distinction between teams such as Dev (Development) and Ops (Operations). Other traditional processes and technologies include monolithic architectures, physical servers, and waterfall methodologies.
Modern methods, in contrast, include team collaboration and product orientation. Processes must become increasingly Agile, including continuous delivery and automation everywhere. Finally, new technologies should be adopted, including clouds, containers, microservices, APIs, and serverless technologies. Businesses of all sizes have people, processes, and technologies that range from traditional to modern.
The mistake is to focus on one or two of them. Organizations often try to “boil the ocean” and fail to achieve the results they seek. DevOps requires all three: culture change, agile processes, and new technologies. Only with such a strategic approach can organizations ensure effective collaboration and product orientation. Teams can achieve their goal of a continuous stream of new features, improvements, and bug fixes while delighting their internal and external customers.
Mistake 2 – Focus on Dev or Ops
Organizations often ask whether processes are development-oriented or activity-oriented. This is due to the conflict traditionally associated with development goals and operational goals. Developers want to build software, integrate systems, and move as quickly as possible. Operations teams, on the other hand, want stability, security, and control that are not usually associated with speed.
Organizations make a mistake when they decide to focus only on Dev or focus all their efforts on Ops. The goal is to build collaboration between these two groups through DevOps. This is achieved when organizations recognize the conflict and division between Dev and Ops and encourage collaboration between teams.
Everyone works towards the same goal: to rapidly develop and deliver high-quality software while reducing costs and risks for the benefit of the organization and end-users.
Mistake 3 – Lack of Deployment Strategies
Depending on where an organization is in the transition to DevOps, it may or may not learn and implement deployment strategies. These strategies focus on high-quality deployments and risk management. For this, both processes and assistive technologies are used.
Deployment strategies include A/B, Blue/Green, and Canary. Each of them recognizes that there are many types of change, and not all of them meet the same standard.
Using them means that you should test changes to check their quality and implement them with confidence. This process can be repeated with continuous experiments. The benefits of rapid, controlled implementation of changes to given conditions are reduced downtime and reduced risk. On a larger scale, companies are becoming more efficient by delivering high-quality changes to their end-users more frequently.
Adopting deployment strategies may not be the first thing you do when implementing DevOps, but it would be a mistake to overlook the benefits of using more advanced forms of deployment as your DevOps implementation evolves.