Click to learn more about author Harikrishna Kundariya.

“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion” – Lee Bolman

This is the second part of a two-part column on DevOps. The first part was: DevOps for Organizational Change: Is It an Evangelist or a Myth?

The above quote is aptly right in the implementation of DevOps. Hence to have a proper procedure as per the need and support is very crucial for its successful implementation.

The cultural shift should get driven with the right tools and innovative new process across the organization. The following are the ten successful DevOps Strategies to make the most of it:

1. Developing a DevOps Culture

As per 2019 report of Gartner, 90 % of I & O Organizations attempting to use DevOps without laying their cultural foundations will fail. For effective DevOps implementation to enable the organization’s successful transformation, it should develop a proper DevOps culture. It can get done in many ways, including:

2. Redefine Trust

To make the trust in the traditional approaches to be transformed into DevOps methodology, it has to get earned. It is only possible fast when all teams collaborate to demonstrate success. It can get done via small pilots before embarking into more prominent initiatives.

3. Top-Down Sponsorship

Cultural changes as in other changes are only possible starting from the rock bottom with top-down sponsorship. It could be done well in small units such as one team level. It will enable us to showcase the possibilities, identifying obstacles, and solving them.

4. To Own & Control Responsibilities

DevOps should be designed for autonomy and empowerment to own and control obligations. The overtaken responsibilities from previous functions should get due to the organization’s confidence.

It gets done with proper testing, risk management, and keeping escalation protocols in place. It is to get done in a way that they happen by default within the process. It enables the process to avoid bottlenecks without external interferences.

5. Embrace DevOps Mindset

To change the traditional mindset is the fundamental strategy to be developed for successful DevOps implementation. Hence it should have the vigor and hunger to crave for improvement through testing. It includes the process, quality, speed, impact on every person in all corners of the organization.

To enable this culture, it requires the following:

• For identifying both issues and opportunities, flexible systems have to get placed properly

• Conduct rapid adjustments

• Repeating the test again

• Identifying the current value streams or the series of activities which are necessary for moving products from development to production

• Finding out the gray areas where the ongoing delivery process is inefficient and needs improvement

• Trial and error are required to identify the weak, such areas.

• Encouraging the organization’s management to ask questions about the experiments and answering their queries.

• Embrace strong communicative and collaborative practices with everyone in the organization

6. The Reward for Results Rather Than Process Compliance

It is imperative for any cultural change to be measured and rewarded for the right things. Sys-admins can get evaluated from all levels, including the contracts at the C-level to weekly objects. It could also get aligned as per the behavior required to achieve strategic business outcomes.

7. Maximize Metrics

The metrics which track and record progress is the tool to show results. It also enables us to gain trust with the initial metric showing, not good results. Hence improvement with records could be a tool to enhance confidence.

Identifying the right metrics will enable us to know where the organization currently stands. Then it is necessary to set goals for all the determined metrics to allow the team to understand what they need to get done. Also, the progress should be made in a transparent way for effective communication and collaboration.

The Following are Some of the Useful Metrics:

• Production failure rates which give the details of the number of frequent failures in software during a fixed period

• Meantime to recover gives the time taken from failure to recovery.

• Average lead time showcases the time required for a new requirement to be built, tested, delivered, and deployed into production.

• Deployment speed showcase the speed at which it can deploy a new version of an application to a particular environment.

• Deployment frequency shows the frequency of the deployment of new release candidates to test, preproduction, and production environments.

• Meantime to production gives the time taken for a new code to be committed into a code respiratory and also for it to get deployed to production.

8. Understand Unique Needs

As is widely known, DevOps is not a tool to automate the organization and bring in success. It is more of a journey about changing the organizational culture, including its people’s habits and communication. Also, it caters to the customers’ needs precisely without overloading them. But it improves the usability, security, and other aspects which the customers are concerned.

9. Adopt Iteratively

To build and increase confidence, the following iterative steps can be done:

• Tackle first the highest value stream constraints to get the most significant business impact

• Ensure progress in the framework and pilot before expanding into more significant projects

• Make sure that those involved in the pilot are influences to take the principles back to their teams.

• In the case of software, the development organization starts from the delivery process to move towards production and make sure to implement branch management strategies.

• Continue with comprehensive continuous integration after the basement of automation is made stable.

10. Early emphasize of QA

In many cases, the quality is affected at the cost of acceleration. It could be avoided by automating all test runs and also to perform regression and smoke tests. These should be done within the delivery process to maintain quality.

Deploy Smart Automation

Everything in an organization, including the infrastructure, environment, built test, process, and many more should be defined and written in code. Intelligent automation is starting first where it needs most like broken or time-intensive or frequently prone to error. It, in the long run, will benefit from Reduced delivery times.

• Increasing repeatability
• Eliminates configuration drift

Advance Strategies for DevOps Adoption

Once the organization is significantly ad versed to DevOps adoption, it is time to roll out the following:

• Continuous integration platform
• Continuous delivery platform
• Continuous testing environment
• Continues deployment system
• Continuous monitor performance

Blue/Green Deployment

It is used to reduce downtime and also mitigate risks. When the change gets completed, and a new deployment blue is triggered, it is made to run parallel to the old one or green.

Both run parallel and the blue is fed with small amounts of traffic, and if it is successful, the old one green gets removed. In case of failure, the green continues to run with the traffic. It avoids system crashes and also downtime.

Select the Right Tools

A cultural shift is the focus of DevOps adoption; it is also critical to select the right tool. There are different tools as per the DevOps environment.

They should be following the security and governance requirement, even when working with a cloud. The tools should work with the cloud, support network, and It resources. Also, they should comply with the necessary security and governance requirements.

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us” is an adage by Marshall McLuhan, which implies the importance of tools in DevOps adoption.

Use of proper tool gains prominence due to the shifting of every role with the increase in the velocity. Hence to have the appropriate tool is pertinent.

The Following 5 Points can be Used to Select the Right Tool:

• Understand the requirements thoroughly

• Define the kind of DevOps process is necessary

• Select the tool suitable for collaboration as per the organization needs

• Enable automation testing with continuously monitoring performance

DevOps Benefits

Technical Benefits

• Continuous and fast software delivery
• Easy to manage with less complexity
• Problems are resolved fast

Cultural Benefits

• Productive teams are happier and innovative
• Increases employee engagement
• Greater professional development opportunities

Business Benefits

• Features are delivered fast
• Operating systems are made more stable
• Communication and collaboration improved

Advantages of Adopting DevOps

1. Improved customer experience and satisfaction with the increase in revenue opportunity

2. Breaking down the IT silos which were the result of hierarchical organizational models

3. Aligning IT and business by creating empathy throughout all teams of an organization

4. Enable the company by transforming IT to deliver innovation and agility to help achieve business outcomes and competitiveness

5. Digital transformation by new digital services that enhance customer experience and employee productivity

6. Improves agility, modularity, and adaptive IT enable to cope up with the rapid rate of change for business accelerates.

7. Its velocity ensures faster delivery of features and provides service delivery at unprecedented speed.

8. With its velocity advantage, it brings new revenue-generating services online faster

9. Its culture of resiliency and agility empowers a more collaborative workforce to easily and quickly address changing customer demands.

10. The ability to obtain continuous feedback and incorporating it more expeditiously into application development

11. Visibility to build, run and secure modern applications to deliver quicker software in no time

12. Enables innovation of teams multiple times for a day to roll out actual products and services

13. Differentiating capabilities through emerging technologies to be first to market or even early to market

14. Software stability and quality maintained above standards with the full accountability of everyone in all teams.

15. Reduces risk to enable to drive through changes safely

16. Empowers teams with a culture 0f trusting everyone to contribute to the continuous delivery chain.

17. To Optimize & streamline the process by enabling teams to learn from experience in real-time and react by rolling forward and not by reverting.

18. Improving productivity by a real rethink of quality assurance automation, availability of staging servers, and many more.

19. Saves a lot of time as well as the money

20. Focusing performance not only on the testing phase but throughout the lifecycle

21. Prevent bugs from getting embedded into products which becomes harder to fix

22. Balance workflows across the operations team

23. Increases overall productivity

24. Highly satisfying & engaging user experiences

25. Improved profitability & competitive edge

26. Lean & small DevOps team

27. Automation makes it easier to hire generalists than hi-fi professionals and specialists.

28. Cross- training the DevOps team for better results.

29. Agility decreases reaction time.

30. Eliminates barriers to customer conversion

31. Improving ROI of data with its automated and agile approach on the data by utilizing Big Data tools

32. The business assurance

33. Continuous monitoring

34. Real-time analytics

35. Actionable insight into business agility using a coherent traffic-based data structure model

36.Ultra high scalability to support and mix of services and millions of users

37.Competitive advantage with faster time to market and incorporation of user feedback

38. Survival is the fundamental advantage because without it, there is the threat of facing extinction as competitors and new entrants will take the market-share in no time with DevOps.

39. Revenue & top-line growth with seamless collaboration with development and operations translates to the business bottom line by cost reductions, competitive products, and company growth.

40. Higher business valuation by widening the performance gap with their competitors and even with the organization itself

41. High deployment rates by incorporating continuous delivery

42. Improved defect detection with updates of smaller frequent releases to make the final product with fewer defects or bugs

43. Ability to achieve quicker MVP or minimum viable product with continuous integration, faster deployment, and iterative feedbacks

44. Increased effectiveness with new tools and effective practices

45. Stable & reliable operating environments

Conclusion

DevOps Save Time & Money

Integrated automated testing with DevOps is the best thing to do to save time, money while increasing quality and time to market. It has transformed to bridge innovation and execution into a proper strategy from being a methodology. A single window system is formed to facilitate communication, collaboration, and integration.

DevOps – IT Philosophy

DevOps is the modern-day IT philosophy to bring under a single umbrella all the teams together. By creating a stable operating environment, it enhances many functions. It includes the control and optimization of costs, fixes bugs, eliminates human errors, and also converts codes to cash quickly. All this is done while improving resource management.

Collaboration for Customer Satisfaction

DevOps is all about borderless and frictionless cooperation between developers and operation teams. It hence enables the best of user experience and customer satisfaction. Its ability is time to market of new revenue-generating online fast gives the competitive edge. Whether it is a Greenfield deployment which is from scratch or brownfield deployment, which runs parallel DevOps makes it successful.