Is DevOps The Default Now and Are You DevOps Ready?

DevOps needs no introduction in 2020! The pandemic has prompted many organizations to realize their innovations faster and pivot their software development, internal processes and business level strategies for a quicker innovation. If you are overwhelmed by the volume of projects, constraints in delivery demands for constant change and a continuous flow of development and configuration migrations, you probably needed DevOps yesterday. Time is not all too lost though, and they say it is never too late to adopt something. DevOps can help you specify, design, develop, maintain, deploy and host applications as well as increase your ability to deliver on business requirements. On the flip side though, DevOps can be inherently complex, especially if you need entire teams just to implement it and a lot of time and effort invested in learning the tools and techniques to make it effective.
As per the State of DevOps Report, high-performing IT organizations have 200 more frequent deploys, recover 24 times faster from failures, have a 3x lower change failure rate and 2,555 times shorter lead times. And, employees in high performing organizations are twice as likely to recommend their organization to a friend as a great place to work resulting in attracting top talent easily. High performers spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework and 50% less time on remediating security issues than low performers. Below, we will discuss on signs company needs DevOps and is DevOps ready:

1. How Agile Are You and Are You Ready for Culture Change?

Smaller companies are usually more agile given their size compared to large companies who may struggle to fully exploit DevOps. Adopting DevOps means you will need to achieve change in the whole organisation and not just optimise parts of the process. DevOps deployment means a new culture is necessary with methodologies and development processes that cover both developers and operations. The goal is to make everybody work together without silos or bottlenecks where they may exist in current IT processes.

2. Do You Support the Open Source Movement?

Is your team willing to share their findings and collaborate with other departments? Can you establish a sharing culture for tooling, methods, knowledge, procedures and data, successes and failures? Developers, testers, IT security and operations will have to collaborate to improve processes and automate where possible. This will require a culture change where historically these functions are used to working in separate silos. After DevOps deployment, some developers may also be required to accept a higher level of responsibility for the production environment to ensure that their code is easy to fix or doesn’t break anything. Operations will need to hand over a part of their role to Dev and provide access to everything needed for the production environment. Operations will also have to help create capabilities for Dev to create new dev, production or test instances and also create solid easy routines for backups/restores in case things go south.

3. Are You Willing and Able to Implement New DevOps Tools?

Once you’ve aced the cultural shift and you’ve got the right skill sets in your team, you will need to assess which tools to use for adopting DevOps and DevOps deployment. The right tools are crucial, and you are likely to need access to infrastructure, configuration management tools, continuous integration and continuous delivery tools, monitoring and logging software such as Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Salt to name a few. You will also need employees with skills in both Development and Operations for which you might have to retrain some of your staff which can take time and benefit in the longer term than in the shorter run.

4. Are You Willing to Start-Up Small and then Scale Up? Are you Willing to Automate Everything to Innovate More?

Use a small project for a deployment similar to what the digital product companies do by building POC for products, where a DevOps style of work would be beneficial, such as a microservices architecture implementation, and test and accept the tooling, processes and routines. Use this project as a model for a larger implementation later. Automation should reduce human error, break silos, bottlenecks, be easier to perform and decrease dependency on key personnel being available.

5. Have You Already Adopted DevOps and are Knee Deep in DevOps but Don’t Know if You are Meeting Your Goals?

It is important to measure the impact and performance of any process. Common metrics you might like to measure are ‘deployment frequencies’, ‘mean time to recover’, ‘from commit to deploy’ and ‘Change Failure Rate’. Your company will need to find which metrics are the most important to you though and hopefully in time the DevOps team will be keen to prove how they have improved performance.

A Few Other Quick Ways to Check Whether You Are DevOps Ready Are:

• Do you have poor control over code release and configuration processes?
• Do you have the time and effort necessary to learn all the tools and techniques that make DevOps effective?
• Do you have enough budget to establish a DevOps culture?
• Are you prepared to continuously evaluate and improve chosen processes, routines and tooling?

If you want a quick check try using dnsmap to assess if you have rogue subdomains and retire.js to find outdated risky JavaScript libraries. The answers you find will help you assess how secure you are and by default whether you’re ready to move to DevOps. DevOps was a buzz till yesterday and today organizations are implementing it at a high rate. If you want to implement DevOps in your organization, you should have a DevOps partner to understand its advantages and use cases. Our team of DevOps can assist you to fasten your application development and delivery.

At Pratiti Technologies, we help teams put together strategies focused on their unique needs, strengths, and goals. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you build your DevOps strategy and help it mature over time.

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