Latest Technology DevOps:
Expectations vs. Reality
Even when DevOps adoption is accelerating in both web-native
organizations and big enterprises, confusion continue about what does it
exactly means? Is DevOps a movement, a culture, a philosophy, an approach or a
mix of these things? Or is DevOps different to different people? So, here is a
complete guide to DevOps for those of you who have just started your journey in
DevOps.
What Is DevOps Exactly?
DevOps is defined as a combination of software development
and operations methodology to deliver services and applications. It promotes regular communication, and real-time, ongoing collaboration between
IT operations teams and workflows of developers. DevOps helps businesses to
serve their clients better and compete strongly in the huge market. Precisely,
DevOps technologies unite software development and operations
with the aim of assisting organizations to develop products with better
efficiency and speed.
Why DevOps?
Although there is no “silver bullet”, a sure-fire way to
improve IT efficiency, but DevOps has produced results that can’t be ignored. As software development and software
operations become more linked and as organizations become more
reliant on the cloud infrastructure, project managers and executives should
develop skills in DevOps to stay highly competitive and make sure that their
teams are working at their best potential. Some more reasons why DevOps is
gaining popularity include:
1. Faster
Innovation, Shorter Development Cycles
With a combined operations and
development team, applications are prepared for usage much faster. With shorter
development cycles, an application can come much quicker in the market.
2. Improved
Collaboration and Communication
With DevOps, combined teams become
more productive and happier. The whole process becomes more seamless as
everyone works towards a single goal.
3. Accelerate
Resolution Time
With fluid communication and full
transparency between combined teams, downtime is minimized and issues are resolved
faster than before.
4. Increased
Efficiency
Increased efficiency speeds up the
development procedure and makes it lesser prone to errors. DevOps automation
can automate the procedure of testing codes, decreasing the manual work. Thus, software engineers have more time to complete tasks that cannot be
automated.
5. Reduced
Costs
All the DevOps advantages translate
to decreased IT headcount needs and overall costs. According to a study, DevOps a team needs 35% lesser IT staff and nearly 30% lesser IT costs.
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Overview Of DevOps
DevOps unifies people, technology and processes across IT and
development in 5 core practices: plan and track, develop, create and test,
deliver and monitor, and operations. While practicing DevOps, IT operations,
development, security, and quality engineering teams work together – breaking
practices that were siloes before. Enhanced collaboration and coordination
across all these disciplines reduce the time when any change is there is a
system and when that change is put into production. It also guarantees that
standards for reliability and security are met as a part of the procedure. And
the result is a better product, faster delivery, and happier clients.
Expectations vs. Reality
In a recent study released on the costs and impacts of
falling behind on DevOps movement, the gap between expectation of value from
public cloud, containers, microservices and DevOps and what organizations can
do now was explored.
Some main findings of the market survey include:
Ø 67% of respondents weren’t confident in
their abilities to deal with risks in the cloud.
Ø 74% of respondents identified the
DevOps significance, but 33% only could deliver DevOps enablement only.
Ø 40% only found DevOps to make a
positive impact, whereas 25% said it created negative or no impacts.
Ø 53% told they lack skills and
resources to shift to DevOps
But, lack of confidence, noteworthy time investment,
significant financial investment or culture change may be some reasons to keep
away from DevOps, but they shouldn’t be excuses to not implement DevOps.
The Challenges Of DevOps And
Recommended Approach
DevOps has earned worldwide recognition over the years and
IT experts have not just given a thought to it, but they have also gone the
extra mile to implement it in their organization, working towards a fully
automated world. DevOps automation is one of the main pillars of the movement.
But, in spite of its popularity, DevOps implementation is a challenge for some
people. Let’s look at a few challenges faced during its implementation.
Selecting the Right Project
For the new DevOps teams, using DevOps for every project
that comes up may seem smart. But this is not the right choice always. DevOps
is not necessary always and it can sometimes slow down the whole production
procedure if it is not done appropriately. You need to be cautious while
choosing projects for DevOps use.
DevOps process is
a completely operational strategy. It is not the right fit all the time. If you
are working on a software that should gain speed from agility and is promptly
expected to scale, then DevOps can be a smart option.
However, DevOps does not work well always. Don’t make it
your go-to solution. If you are using older systems, it is good to stick to old
processes. Don’t use DevOps technology as your blanket solution even if it does
not fit.
Culture Change
During DevOps implementation, workplace culture is seen to
undergo maximum change. It is one of the hardest areas to change. The workplace
culture becomes ingrained slowly in the employees and workers.
Transforming culture is a process that needs lots of
endurance and patience. As an organization, you should intend to create a
collaborative culture. All the leaders must maintain a positive and transparent
air in the workplace. The pro-DevOps should convince all co-workers of this
culture’s benefits.
Giving Up All Legacy Systems
Everyone should change with time. The older applications and
infrastructure can’t be used forever. Trying to flourish on the legacy
infrastructure will rarely give you needed results. So, to
succeed, every company should update with the newest software and technologies.
The enterprises and companies should update their current
software and hardware systems. The main aim of this is to phase out all the
non-DevOps systems ultimately in the future.
Tools Turbulence
When implementing DevOps, one gets attracted to the various available tools. They become dependent on
those tools gradually to resolve even the smallest problems. Because of their
attractive and new features, organizations mistakenly choose DevOps tools
available for short-term use instead of long term advantages.
A few of the tools are SaaS-based or open-source and users
can start working after a fast trial. These DevOps tools can be adopted without
supervision from authorities, but this isn’t good for the organization always.
Hence, organizations should provide a DevOps tools library to the teams from
which the employees can select their desired DevOps tools.
Performance Testing
Extensive testing has become more important than ever
before. Thanks to DevOps technology, it has become possible to create and
launch products faster. But testing your products sufficiently before launch is
the need of the time.
DevOps is excellent at lots of things. But, when it comes to
bugs resolutions, it has some limitations. If your bugs fixing procedure is not
like your DevOps process, you will experience more failures than successes.
Problems solving is the foundation of DevOps, therefore, ensure that your
DevOps procedure covers debugging to rise your software
performance.
Process Challenges
For people who live by rules and follow guidelines blindly,
DevOps can be challenging. There are no fixed frameworks in this system to
dictate to the teams on how they need to deal with a project to attain the
desired goals. The employees can decide their course of action without a
structured strategy. There is no DevOps team to choose the right systems and
DevOps tools that can be used by teams and individuals.
While DevOps offers more scope for responsibility and
innovation and empowers the employees, it can even be quite challenging.
Creating an application has lots of levels managed by various teams. When all
the teams working on the same app have different ways of work ethics and approach,
disputes and confusion arise.
With collaboration between the teams comes productivity.
Breaking culture barriers to make teams work together will pave the path for
your business expansion. The thought of working in collaborative manners across
various teams can assist you to embrace DevOps and attain your goals.
Risk Analysis
It is quite difficult to disrupt the age-old methods and
replace those with the new ones. As far as risk analysis is considered, the
business analysts design dashboards by scaling many reports. It is done after
various calculations. Mostly, it’s simple to begin but difficult to scale.
After putting things in action, workers frequently face the problem of keeping
the pace constant. Hence, adopting new methodologies involve risks largely.
The integration of DevOps tools helps us collect appropriate data and place them in one repository.
There also are tools that help in creating useful metrics and reports from the
collected data using particular parameters like percentage change in users
volume, deployment frequency, the percentage change in failed and passed
deployments, the percentage change in customers ticket volume, etc for a specific
time period. It can help achieve end-to-end traceability for the whole
process.
Conclusion
Changes are hard at the starting, cluttered at the midpoint
and magnificent in the end. In this era, if an organization fails at constant
creativity or innovation it’ll be soon replaced by some better company. Changes
that seem challenging and unwelcoming in the beginning will definitely pay off
in the long term.
The DevOps approach is now finding
room both for constant improvement and automation, two important aspects of
this technological world. Transforming to DevOps process will take time as
there are lots of challenges threatening teams still. But with the right
strategy and some patience, you can go ahead!
