{"id":4131,"date":"2016-12-12T06:06:50","date_gmt":"2016-12-12T06:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/?p=4131"},"modified":"2024-04-10T05:43:28","modified_gmt":"2024-04-10T05:43:28","slug":"doing-devops-the-right-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/doing-devops-the-right-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Doing DevOps, the Right Way"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In my previous posts, we have discussed the fundamentals of DevOps and how to overcome the challenges associated with software delivery. We have also explored the intrinsic benefits that organizations can expect in the long run. As most organizations have now embraced the\u00a0importance of DevOps<\/a>, it\u2019s important to take a closer look at what goes into doing DevOps right and ensuring an optimized experience.<\/p>\n

Here is a list of 10 things that you should focus on to do DevOps<\/a><\/strong><\/em> right:<\/p>\n

\u2022 DevOps Subject Matter Expert<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 A vast majority believes that DevOps is easily doable and does not require specialized expertise. However, this couldn\u2019t be further from the truth as it is essential to leverage the capabilities of specialized experts. Identifying or bringing in a DevOps expert is the first & foremost step and ideally the person should be able to own, drive, strategize, design & implement DevOps end-to-end.<\/p>\n

Bringing in the right SME is key to successfully embracing & implementing DevOps in an organization that might have the aptitude but not necessarily the expertise. It\u2019s imperative that with a lot of organizations taking their first steps towards DevOps, this SME should be able to wear multiple hats as needed and shape-shift into anything from an incubator to an accelerator.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Evangelize DevOps<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Every organization looking to succeed with DevOps, needs an executive champion who can evangelize DevOps across the organization. However, to use this influence and turn it into an actionable plan requires organizing dedicated workshops, impromptu knowledge sharing sessions and conducting focused seminars to make employees understand\u00a0what DevOps is<\/a>\u00a0and the reason the organization is embracing this path.<\/p>\n

\u2022 DevOps Strategy<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 As with most other transformative endeavors, strategy is the critical piece to ensure you are on the path to success with\u00a0DevOps<\/a>. Not surprisingly, this doesn\u2019t come easy as you will have to go through multiple iterations of your strategy as you cajole a number of disparate groups towards a common vision. A lot of times, the outcome of such discussions will lead you to \u201cwillingly\u201d change the way you have worked before.<\/p>\n

Most of these discussions are rooted in inertia and carry with them a strong resistance to change as each siloed team believes they have been doing things right and don\u2019t need any course correction. Once the spade work has been put in to overcome this mentality, the same people are usually super excited and willing to make the changes while taking on additional responsibility. This is where the cultural setup of an organization plays a huge role as some companies are more amenable to learning and adapting to a new reality while others are dogmatic at their very core and are likely to remain rigid even to their own detriment.<\/p>\n

However, this is where a seasoned consultant can step in and ease a smooth transition by conducting a thorough requirements gathering, enabling a deep dive analysis, defining a roadmap and the goals an organization is looking to achieve within a particular timeframe.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Clearly defined KRAs<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 It is critical to have the right KRAs in place to measure the success of your\u00a0DevOps implementation<\/a>. While every organization would do well to have their own KRAs depending upon their unique circumstances, there is something to be said about borrowing from a commonality that exists amongst in the experience of those embracing DevOps for the very first time. According to a recent Puppet survey, that included more than 4,000 respondents, the most important measures of DevOps improvement were:<\/p>\n

\u2022Deployment frequency \u2022Speed of deployment \u2022Deployment success rate \u2022Turnaround time for restoring a service after a failed deployment \u2022Culture, which actually can\u2019t be measured.<\/p>\n

\u2022 DevOps Team<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 There are different notions about the \u201cDevOps\u201d team and it varies significantly based on who you are talking to. In some cases, you don\u2019t need a DevOps team at all as your development team will do everything end-to-end. In some other cases, members from dev, QA and ops would have to ramp up and carry the load. While for others, hiring specialized DevOps engineers is crucial to get their journey started.<\/p>\n

While there are pros and cons associated with each approach, there is a reason why it is not recommended that development team be exclusively responsible for DevOps. What I have seen work in helping clients successfully embrace DevOps is setting up a seed DevOps team that has skills in multiple areas, have specialized knowledge of various processes and tools while being comfortable with the notion of enabling automation as needed. Based on your own talent pool you can decide to fill this team with internal resources or bring in external consultants.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Pilot Project<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 As much as we would love a big bang, success with DevOps is all about starting small and making incremental gains. Hence it is important to pick a pilot project, which is primed to succeed with DevOps and allows you to measure the changes that are being achieved. There needs to be a fine balance in choosing the right kind of pilot project as it shouldn\u2019t be too small nor too big. You should choose a pilot project that can assure sufficient visibility with a team that is willing to accept change and be the pioneer for DevOps implementations across the organization.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Unifying Processes, Tools & Technologies<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 It isn\u2019t uncommon to see certain groups in an organization being tied to a particular tool set, often resulting in a conflict of opinion with other teams. Gaining consensus about the most optimally structured processes and mapping them to the right technologies is also a source of anguish. This can especially turn into a source of anguish in the case of medium to large scale organizations and hence the right kind of due diligence must be carried out in order to avoid a sticky situation.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Automate, Automate, Automate<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 A large part of the success of any DevOps project depends on the degree of automation it is able to achieve. Automation is the seed team\u2019s hardcore responsibility, stitching all the processes and tools together to create the complete workflow.<\/p>\n

\u2022 End-To-End Implementation<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 While the importance of choosing the right kind of pilot project cannot be overemphasized, it is also important to follow through and ensure an end-to-end implementation. The objective should be to showcase tangible benefits from embracing DevOps rather than measuring against all your KRAs right from the get go.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Extend your learning across all projects<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Once all the lessons associated with taking the plunge into DevOps have been learnt from the first pilot project, it is important to scale up and implement the same learnings in a phased manner across all the important areas of your organization. This is also the right time to decide if you would like to continue engaging with an external consultant or bring it in-house by having your internal resources take over the baton and progress along the DevOps path.<\/p>\n

Ultimately the journey to DevOps success is a collaborative one and is filled with new learnings at every curve. When I started writing these blogs, I didn\u2019t foresee it turning into a series but I intend to share my experiences and provide anecdotes that will help you in embracing DevOps successfully.<\/p>\n

If you are thinking about DevOps or are about take your first few steps and need a helping hand, feel free to reach out to me at karthiga.sadasivan@happiestminds.com<\/p>\n

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In my previous posts, we have discussed the fundamentals of DevOps and how to overcome the challenges associated with software delivery. We have also explored the intrinsic benefits that organizations can expect in the long run. As most organizations have now embraced the\u00a0importance of DevOps, it\u2019s important to take a closer look at what goes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":4132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[319],"tags":[320],"class_list":["post-4131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-devops","tag-devops"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11976,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131\/revisions\/11976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.happiestminds.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}