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The DevOps movement is a hot topic in the tech and business worlds, but it can be hard to implement at your company.
If you want to get ahead of your competitors, you need to adopt this mindset and put everyone on board with the DevOps process. This includes not just developers but also sales teams and support staff. Everybody must understand how they’re contributing to the overall success of your business.
This blog post will discuss why it’s important to have an agile culture and how DevOps can help make that happen in your organization. Then we’ll get into ways to implement these principles through DevOps training.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is derived from development (dev) and operations (ops). It’s essentially a culture that promotes communication between the different teams working on a single product. It aims to remove the silos of other departments working without collaboration or communication and, therefore, hinder the workflow.
The concept of DevOps principles first originated in IT companies and was used for software development. However, it has since been adopted by most other businesses and is even used in marketing, sales, and support departments.
Even in the IT industry, there are misconceptions about what a DevOps methodology is and how it should be used. Some people think that DevOps is all about automation and using different automation DevOps tools together. Others believe that it’s about bringing in automation within the company, so people don’t have to work as much.
In reality, the DevOps initiative is more of a cultural change rather than an IT-related one. It’s really another way of thinking and approaching problems differently.
This is why DevOps is a significant part of the Agile methodology.
How does DevOps come into play in Agile?
Agile is a development strategy that focuses on building products iteratively and incrementally. The goal of an agile team is to provide working products by using short cycles. The team should be able to respond quickly to changes and adapt to them.
The DevOps culture is a key part of the agile methodology because it helps with the collaboration between different teams. It removes the barriers that can hinder communication, such as departmental silos. This allows for a faster workflow and more efficient use of resources.
The main goal of DevOps is to produce high-quality products delivered on time. The process aims to do this by maximizing the work done with minimal effort, minimizing waste, and focusing on continuous improvement.
Everyone in your organization must know how they contribute to the success of your business through DevOps solutions. This can be achieved by involving all teams, from sales to support, during the development process.
DevOps Foundation
Transitioning from your current processes to DevOps can be difficult. It requires a shift in mindset, culture, and team structure, and it’s not something that can be done overnight.
Within SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), DevOps consists of several practices that need to be implemented.
Value stream management
Value stream management (VSM) is a DevOps practice that includes the definition of value streams, flow management, and how processes are organized. It also involves identifying waste within the system to minimize it as much as possible.
The goal is for teams to reduce time spent on tasks that don’t add any real value or aren’t part of the final product. This will allow them to focus more energy on the important tasks and will have a larger impact.
Continuous quality
Continuous quality or continuous improvement is a DevOps essential. It is all about ensuring that the product meets customer expectations and needs without defects or issues. This makes for a better user experience and enhances their overall satisfaction with your company.
The goal here is to implement tests that will help you track and monitor how good (or bad) the current version of the product is performing in real-time. This will allow you to make adjustments and corrections as soon as possible, minimizing the amount of time spent on fixing errors after they’ve been released.
Continuous quality, improvement, and continuous testing include practices like hypothesis-driven development, behavior-driven design (BDD), exploratory testing, test-driven development (TDD), and more.
Continuous security
Continuous security is about ensuring that your systems and applications are safe from attack. This includes implementing measures to protect your data, as well as detecting and preventing any unauthorized access.
Practices such as threat modeling, security by design, intrusion detection, and penetration testing are all part of continuous security.
Version control
Version control is a system that helps you track and manage changes to your files. This can be helpful when multiple team members are working on the same project, as it allows for better coordination and collaboration.
The goal here is to clearly understand how each change affects the overall project. It also makes it easier to revert to an earlier version if something goes wrong.
Configuration management
If version control is how then configuration management is what. The things stored in version control are configurations. These are different configurations of software, hardware, and other systems, and they represent the entire design time and runtime of a solution.
Configuration management (CM) is the process of managing these configurations. It includes identifying what needs to be configured, how it should be configured, and who should configure it.
Infrastructure management
Through infrastructure management, your teams ensure the stability and resiliency of all deployed solutions.
Infrastructure management includes practices like chaos engineering, site readability engineering, selective releases, and similar. It also consists of tools for automation such as release on-demand, auto-scaling, and rapid recovery.
Agile planning and design
The truth is that DevOps work begins way before the development phase. It starts with the design of the system and its architecture.
To achieve Continuous Delivery, you need a solid foundation that can be built upon throughout the development process. This is where agile planning and design come in.
Agile planning and design help you create that foundation by allowing for constant change and evolution. The goal is to have a system that can be easily adapted to new requirements and changes without going through the entire development process again.
Deployment pipeline
The Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is the cornerstone of DevOps. It’s what allows for the continuous deployment of code to production.
The pipeline comprises a series of stages, each one responsible for a different aspect of the deployment process. This includes things like testing, packaging, and deploying the application. The pipeline starts with the codebase and ends with the application being live in production.
Each stage in the pipeline can be automated, which helps to speed up the entire process.
Continuous monitoring
Production events need to be properly captured, logged and analyzed. Otherwise, you won’t have the visibility required to detect any problems.
Continuous monitoring includes practices like understanding how your system is performing in production and setting up dashboards so that relevant teams can be alerted when something goes wrong.
It also consists of real-time or near-real-time analysis for key business metrics. It includes various tools and practices for collecting this data, such as application monitoring, infrastructure logs analysis, error reporting, and more.
Agile product management
Agile product management is a DevOps aspect that enables a continuous learning loop. It’s important to have a system that allows for the rapid and constant incorporation of feedback.
Agile product management allows for regular feedback from stakeholders, team members, and customers. This feedback is then used to further develop and improve the product.
The goal is to minimize risk while maximizing reward by making sure that everyone involved knows what’s happening at all times, without any surprises along the road.
Value metrics
The ultimate goal of DevOps is to deliver value to the customer. So there must be a way to measure that value.
Value metrics are used to measure what your customers are getting in return for your efforts – and not just in terms of features and functions.
You need to be able to measure the business value that’s being delivered, as well as the technical debt that’s being incurred. This will help you make better decisions about what’s worth investing your time and resources into.
Conclusion
When you better understand how everything works together as one unit, it’s much easier to move forward with a DevOps transformation and other Agile strategies in your business. You’ll be able to assemble a cross-functional DevOps team that can work collaboratively toward the same goal.
By learning about the foundational aspects of DevOps, you’ll be able to maximize your chances of success. This knowledge will also help you identify the right DevOps tool for building a solid Continuous Delivery pipeline and set up effective practices that streamline operations within different teams to achieve higher performance and productivity levels.
Learning DevOps isn’t hard or complicated once you understand how it works as one cohesive unit. And the benefits are clear – a more streamlined process, faster time to market, and higher customer satisfaction.
So what are you waiting for? Start learning today! Contact the i4 Group to learn more about DevOps certification training and how you can give your business a competitive edge through implementing DevOps practices.
