Excerpt: The digital sector has experienced substantial advancements in networks, storage, cell phones, and the cloud over the previous ten years. Today, almost everyone has easy access to software-driven development on demand, including my 86-year-old grandpa and my 7-year-old niece.
Introduction:
Custom software development’s industry size was estimated at $388.98 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $650.13 billion by 2025. But it’s easier said than done to improve the software development process! Businesses must figure out how to speed up and automate the start-writing cycle while causing any damage. DevOps strategy enters the scene.
DevOps refers to a joint effort between the operations and development teams. The days of writing code and waiting for a long time to deploy it are officially over. However, applying DevOps without a plan could lead to a jumble of tasks. Read on to discover how to develop a clear DevOps approach in your company and speed up your continuous deployment pipelines to prevent this.
Leading DevOps service providers allow businesses to deliver superior customer service by successfully using the DevOps philosophy, methods, and tools. Let’s talk; after all, your brilliant idea deserves a brilliant execution.
1. Implementation Approach for DevOps: A Step-By-Step Manual
As is common knowledge, the departments of development and their operations have various incentives and objectives. By combining two IT worlds, a clear DevOps roadmap enables firms to eliminate the obstacles that slow innovation.
You should work toward five goals while developing a DevOps strategy: scalability, reliability, cooperation, frequent and quick delivery, and security. Here, you’d hear a lot of talk about how DevOps and Agile work together. Agility and DevOps work best together because of their complementing iterative processes. DevOps should be considered a separate project, nevertheless.
The stages to creating a successful DevOps providing a framework for anticipating your company, are shown below.
2. Analyze your current situation
Implementing DevOps in the real world might be difficult because it’s never easy to switch out old practices for new ones. Therefore, you must first carefully assess the pre-DevOps state of your firm and comprehend the solution structures of the products you intend to develop.
An extreme database corruption, for instance, prevented Netflix from shipping DVDs to its subscribers for three days in 2008. They were aware of the need to switch from horizontally scalable, highly reliable distributed systems in the cloud to vertically-scalable single points of failure as a result of this circumstance. As a result, Netflix finished moving its historical data to AWS in 2016 after diligently working on it for seven years.
In addition, as its subscriber base grew, Netflix encountered more difficulties with the monolithic infrastructure. Additionally, customizing Windows images required human labour and was slow and prone to error. Netflix was well conscious of all these issues due to their extensive awareness of the company’s current situation. By utilizing new technologies and creating their unique tools, which we’ll discuss later, they were able to improve the technique and service rollout.
3. Create a DevOps Mentality and Culture
DevOps is ultimately a culture change about enhancing collaboration, communication, and transparency between developing and executing teams. If not, there might be much greater upheaval. The same is confirmed by Gartner, which forecasts that through 2022, 75% of DevOps programmes will fall short of objectives due to problems with organizational learning and change.
The internet store Etsy is a good example from which we can draw an important lesson. The key to its DevOps adventure is a team with an unbreakable spirit that gauges failure as success. Before implementing DevOps, Etsy was expanding steadily while employing the conventional waterfall methodology.
With the aid of DevOps, they were able to assemble a harmonious team that everybody would want on their side in the event that the website went down. Instead of publishing code twice per week, they were able to produce 80 releases each day because of this mentality.
Transparency growth in the coming years and a climate of psychological safety are two things to bear in mind. Then, you can establish a strong DevOps culture within your organization, which will aid in moving your procedures, tools, and personnel in the direction of a more united customer focus.
4. Establish Your DevOps Procedure
You can enhance infrastructure provisioning, continuous development, and testing by establishing the DevOps approach from the start. The process steps to close the connectivity and alignment gaps across traditionally compartmentalized teams are as follows.
A. CI/CD Stands for Continuous Implementation and Deployment – A key DevOps approach is continuous integration, in which developers regularly add their updated code to the main repository. And where continuous integration leaves off, continuous delivery picks up. It automates the distribution of applications to specified infrastructure settings, such as development and testing. Organizations can adapt to changing consumer needs and guarantee the calibre of application upgrades thanks to CI/CD automation.
Product managers at Spotify’s Technology Infrastructure Group put in a lot of effort to create tools, develop best practices, and streamline business operations in order to transform Spotify into a true DevOps organization. They founded Tingle with the intention of offering a uniform CI/CD interface for all kinds of work and assisting teams in swiftly setting up new projects without worrying about pipeline configuration knowledge. Their centralized CI/CD solution for information, infrastructure, and web services is the tool. Additionally, it helps to cut down the 14-day setup period to just 5 minutes for the first development and deployment.
B. Continuing Evaluation – Continuous software testing is necessary for CI/CD to deliver high-quality applications to users. Naturally, the speedy feedback also raises the calibre of the software. We may claim that Netflix, the company that serves as the DevOps poster child, spontaneously established a DevOps culture. In 2011, Netflix created the “Chaos Monkey” tool to evaluate the resiliency of its IT infrastructure. In order to test how the surviving systems react to the outage, it deliberately turns off computers in Netflix’s production network.
C. Frequent Deployment – The pipeline’s last stage, continuous deployment, involves using tools or scripts to automatically launch and distribute the software artefact to end users. Amazon has a solid reputation for having excellent DevOps. As part of the transformation from physical servers to the AWS cloud, it made the switch to DevOps in 2010. A continuous deployment method run by an internal system called Apollo was also implemented by Amazon. It gives programmers the freedom to deploy code whenever they like to any servers they choose. By 2011, Amazon was updating its production servers with new software on average every 11.6 seconds.
D. Architecture for Microservices – The software industry’s relatively recent microservices paradigm is ideal for DevOps. Small transportable services that carry out certain business logic are modelled after complex apps in this architecture. So that the development, testing, and deployment processes can be streamlined, individual services can be handled individually by delivery teams. Main advantage? One service doesn’t really fail or have an effect on other application components! Modern service-oriented industries make heavy use of microservice architecture. Uber, for instance, has a superb microservice design in its backend. Some ten thousand of its microservices communicate with one another through remote procedure calls. (RPC).
E. System for Managing Containers – Microservice isolation, packaging, and deployment using containers are becoming more common. You can use containers to bundle the source code, frameworks, libraries, configuration data, and dependencies for your application into a single object. To deploy more complex applications, many containers are installed as container groups. These clusters are governed and managed by container orchestrators like Kubernetes.
Additionally, Netflix has adopted containerization in its never-ending quest for scalability. In order to address its particular requirements and further optimize this process, it created its own container administration solution called Titus. The streaming behemoth’s key business operations, including video streaming, content-encoding, suggestions, deep learning, production technologies, big data, internal handling equipment, and other workloads, are all powered by this tool.
5. Your DevOps Toolset of Choice
You can create unique workflows, create a solid foundation, and implement access restrictions for seamless functionality by choosing the appropriate tools in combination with novel new procedures. Therefore, to ensure a seamless connection, you must choose the tools in accordance with your IT infrastructure, your needs and tech architecture, and your preferred cloud provider. For each phase of the DevOps procedure that is relevant, consultants in DevOps employ a variety of tools.
The adoption of DevOps is favourable for eCommerce businesses as well. For example, Shopify became the first significant eCommerce site to use DevOps tools. It makes use of Kubernetes, which has allowed Shopify to dramatically lower infrastructure costs while accelerating page response times.
6. Ensure Compliance and Safety
DevOps privacy is the science and art of utilizing technology, rules, procedures, and tactics to safeguard the entire DevOps ecosystem. Security must be integrated into all phases of the DevOps’ entire life cycle, including conception, design, development, testing, release, and maintenance. DevOps is the name given nowadays to this form of DevOps security.
DevOps allows for the quick pushing and updating of large amounts of code. Code reviews may not always be completed by security teams. Additionally, the DevOps output could have operational flaws if security factors like code analysis, setup verification, and vulnerability scans are not appropriately automated. What then ought should you do?
7. Determine and Track DevOps Metrics
Application performance, velocity, and quality assurance are the core focuses of DevOps implementation. For continuous improvement, teams must gather, examine, and measure metrics in line with the most pertinent business goals and KPIs. You will receive the crucial information from these metrics that you need to be aware of and in charge of your software development pipeline. The important metrics that any DevOps team should monitor are listed below, even though numerous metrics are used to gauge DevOps performance.
8. Assemble a Multidisciplinary Product Team
Throughout a product’s lifespan, a DevOps team must maximize product delivery and value. Your team should be made up of individuals with expertise in both operations and software engineering to accomplish this. But in practice, some team members excel at developing code while others excel at running and managing infrastructure. Therefore, a DevOps team in large organizations typically consists of six key roles. These positions include QA engineers for manual and automated testing, software developers, release managers, security engineers, and evangelists for DevOps.
Conclusion
DevOps is not simply a project; it is a journey to continuously enhance an organization’s procedures and culture in order to provide higher value and customer happiness while achieving better financial results. If you want to learn further about DevOps and adopt the DevOps concept, get in touch with us.
Our Agile, as well as DevOps Advisement & Transformation solutions, are concentrated on assisting clients in identifying critical areas for improvement, benchmarking and aligning their Agile / DevOps procedures to industry best practices, designing target business models to maximize investments, and providing recommendations and a roadmap to embrace Agile & DevOps practices and create an age and development Agile DevOps Organization.
About The Author
Suman Munigonda
Suman Munigonda is a technical content creator who works for Tekslate. He is passionate about technology and is interested in writing content related to the latest technologies like AI, DevOps, Machine Learning, and Data Science. In his free time, he likes playing cricket.
