DevOps
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organisation’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organisations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organisations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
Why Would You Need This Service?
1. Shorter Development Cycles, Faster Innovation
When development and operations teams are in separate silos, it’s usually difficult to tell if an application is ready for operations. When development teams simply turn over an application, the operations’ cycle times are extended needlessly.
With a combined development and operations team, applications are ready for use much more quickly. This is important, since companies succeed based on their ability to innovate faster than their competitors do.
2. Reduced Deployment Failures, Rollbacks, and Time to Recover
Part of the reason teams experience deployment failures is due to programming defects. The shorter development cycles with DevOps promote more frequent code releases. This, in turn, makes it easier to spot code defects. Therefore, teams can reduce the number of deployment failures using agile programming principles that call for collaboration and modular programming. Rollbacks are similarly easier to manage because, when necessary, only some modules are affected.
Time to recover is an important issue, because some failure has to be expected. But recovery is much faster when the development and operations teams have been working together, exchanging ideas and accounting for both teams’ challenges during development.
3. Improved Communication and Collaboration
DevOps improves the software development culture. Combined teams are happier and more productive. The culture becomes focused on performance rather than individual goals. When the teams trust each other, they can experiment and innovate more effectively. The teams can focus on getting the product to market or into production, and their KPIs should be structured accordingly.
It’s no longer a matter of “turning over” the application to operations and waiting to see what happens. Operations doesn’t need to wait for a different team to troubleshoot and fix a problem. The process becomes increasingly seamless as all individuals work toward a common goal.
4. Increased Efficiencies
Increased efficiency helps to speed the development process and make it less prone to error. There are ways to automate DevOps tasks. Continuous integration servers automate the process of testing code, reducing the amount of manual work required. This means that software engineers can focus on completing tasks that can’t be automated.
Acceleration tools are another opportunity for increasing efficiency. For example:
- Scalable infrastructures, such as cloud-based platforms, increase the access the team has to hardware resources. As a result, testing and deployment operations speed up.
- Build acceleration tools can be used to compile code more quickly.
- Parallel workflows can be embedded into the continuous delivery chain to avoid delays; one team waits for another to complete its work.
- Using one environment avoids the useless task of transferring data between environments. This means you don’t have to use one environment for development, a different environment for testing, and a third for deployment.
5. Reduced Costs and IT Headcount
All of the DevOps benefits translate to reduced overall costs and IT headcount requirements. According to Kevin Murphy from Red Hat, DevOps development teams require 35 percent less IT staff and 30 percent lower IT costs.
How We Deliver This Service
Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams are no longer “siloed.” Sometimes, these two teams are merged into a single team where the engineers work across the entire application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment to operations, and develop a range of skills not limited to a single function.
In some DevOps models, quality assurance and security teams may also become more tightly integrated with development and operations and throughout the application lifecycle. When security is the focus of everyone on a DevOps team, this is sometimes referred to as DevSecOps.
These teams use practices to automate processes that historically have been manual and slow. They use a technology stack and tooling which help them operate and evolve applications quickly and reliably. These tools also help engineers independently accomplish tasks (for example, deploying code or provisioning infrastructure) that normally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases a team’s velocity.
Deliverables
Documentation, software, technology and builds to support:
- DevOps Strategy;
- Source Code Control Service;
- Continuous Delivery Service;
- Automated Code Deployment Service;
- Containerisation Approach;
- Project and Issue Tracking;
- Documentation and Collaboration Wiki;
- Test Case Management and Execution.
The diagram illustrates a specific DevOps development tooling, continuous integration and delivery approach.
Typical Outcomes
- Improved operational support and faster fixes;
- Good processes across IT and teams, including automation;
- Increased team flexibility and agility;
- Happier, more engaged teams;
- Cross-skilling and self-improvement;
- Collaborative working;
- Respect from senior management.
Case Studies
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