In the past decade, there has been a huge development in networks, storage, smartphones and the cloud. Custom software development market is continuously growing and showing no signs of slowing down. Optimizing the software development process is easier than done! Challenges for businesses lies in accelerating and automating the write-test-deploy cycle without breaking anything. Here comes the need of DevOps strategy. DevOps strategy means collaborative effort between the development and operations unit.
Those days have gone when a developer would write a code and then wait for a long time to get it deployed. Implementing DevOps without any strategy might result in a disarray of activities. So as to avoid this, here we came with how to implement a clear DevOps strategy in your organization and fast-track your software delivery pipelines. But before digging into it, let’s see the overview of DevOps.
DevOps, IT philosophy and practice combine software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops), intended to shorten system development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high high software quality. DevOps development services correspond with Agile software development; some DevOps aspects came from agile methodology.
Implementing DevOps amalgamates different development, operations, and testing aspects in cross-functional teams across software product or service life cycle. By bringing together collaborative teams across organization, devops creates an environment for bringing code to market very rapidly, minimizing human errors and bugs, improving version control and optimizing costs while improving resource management.
While building a devops strategy, you should strive to achieve five parameters- scalability, reliability, collaboration, frequent and rapid and delivery and security. DevOps and Agile go hand in hand. With its iterative nature, relationship between DevOps and agile is complementary. But DevOps strategy should be treated as a separate initiative. Here are some steps that will create successful DevOps implementation roadmap for organization.
Real-world implementations of DevOps can be challenging because it is difficult to replace the existing methods with new ones. Hence, you need to analyze the company’s pre-DevOps situation and understand the solution patterns of apps that you want to build.
For, instance, Netflix could not ship DVDs to their members for three days due to database corruption in 2008. It realizes them that they need to move away from vertically-scaled single points of failure towards horizontally-scalable, highly reliable, distributed systems in the cloud. Thus, following seven years of diligent efforts, Netflix completed historical cloud migration to AWS in 2016. Also, with increasing numbers of subscribers, Netflix’s battle with the monolith system increased. Customizing Windows images was manual, time consuming and error-prone. Detailed understanding of company’s current state made Netflix aware of all these problems. Hence, they improved the methodology and service deployment by taking advantage of new technologies and developing their own tools.
DevOps is a about improving communication and collaboration between development and operation teams. Because of the issues in organizational learning and change, 75% of DevOps initiatives would fail to meet expectations. From the example of Etsy, which is an online marketplace, we can learn essential lessons. It’s development journey is about the indomitable spirit of a team which measures its success by failures.
Before devops, Etsy was growing and following a traditional waterfall approach. DevOps allowed them to have a team that was at peace with each other, kind that everyone would want in their corner when the site breaks. Such attitude helped them to achieve more that 70 releases a day instead of deploying code twice a week.
Keep in mind two points- clarity in expectations and environment of psychological safety. You can develop proper DevOps culture in company that will help to proceed and align processes, tools etc.
Defining devops process will help you to improve infrastructure provisioning, testing and continuous development cycle. Here are some of the phases of the process to bridge the communication and alignment gap between teams.
Microservices Architecture-
In microservices architecture, small deployable services that performs some business logic are modeled around complex apps. Hence, delivery teams can independently manage individual services and ease the development process, testing and deployment. One of the main benefit is, one service won’t impact other parts of app. Microservices architecture is used across modern service-oriented industries.
CI And CD-
Continuous integration is basic DevOps practice where programmers consistently merge code back to the central repository. Continuous delivery takes up from where continuous integration ends. It automates delivery of apps to designated infrastructure environments such as testing and development. CI/CD allows you to respond to evolving needs of consumers and ensures the quality app updates.
Continuous Testing-
CI/CD needs continuous software testing so as to deliver quality apps to users. And instant feedback improves software quality.
Continuous Deployment-
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