DevOps is more than just a hot topic within the IT industry—it is a tried-and-tested set of practices that can greatly benefit your digital transformation objectives. The definition and concept of DevOps have been somewhat muddied amid so many conversations, prompting confusion about how to implement this operational philosophy best.
By fully understanding the scope of DevOps in your business, you can extract maximum value when implementing your DevOps initiatives.
The first thing to know is that DevOps is a philosophy that you apply to both development and operations management. It aims to bridge the gaps between these two teams and foster a collaborative development environment.
Here are some misconceptions to avoid:
Creating a “DevOps Team” – Many businesses start by thinking they need to create a dedicated DevOps team. In reality, DevOps brings your development and operations teams together to streamline the development cycle and reduce the meantime to deployment (MTTD).
To bring these two teams together, you should foster a collaborative work culture focused on automation, service quality, and operational stability. As your development team builds services that will be deployed on your network, it’s important to involve both the teams to help identify potential issues. This interdepartmental communication will allow your teams to orchestrate their work, ensuring that software is created within the confines of your infrastructure capacity.
Fixation on tools – While tools built around DevOps can be beneficial, focusing heavily on them can cause friction between your development and operations teams. The difference in your teams' daily workloads means no single tool will have all the functionalities required to appease both sides.
Instead, you should take a software-agnostic approach when promoting a DevOps culture within your company. Try to accomplish more with less and avoid what Gartner describes as “disconnected islands of automation.” More tools will undoubtedly increase access to functionality and the complexity of your DevOps approach that may alienate departments in the process.
Safety and quality trumps speed – One of the most commonly touted benefits of DevOps is the increased speed of service delivery and remediation. With continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, you get instant access to automatic testing and debugging functionality. As this aspect of your development cycle accelerates, it can be tempting to match that increase in speed during real-world deployment.
While CI/CD can improve business growth and agility, you should be wary of sacrificing the security and quality of your software releases. By forgetting these crucial aspects of the development cycle, you run the risk of your new software backfiring and creating more work in the long run. Therefore, even with an automated system in place, you should comprehensively assess your software before release to maintain high levels of quality and security.
Keep your software branches simple – With increased visibility in the development process, it can be tempting to overuse feature branches. This breaks the project into smaller chunks and segments specific feature changes from the master development trunk. This isolated development process creates a lot of overheads as the code needs to be reviewed manually before a request is filed to pull the code into the master development trunk. A developer might spend hours or days on work that would be incompatible when merged with the work that other developers were doing simultaneously in their isolated feature branches.
By centralizing your code and continuously integrating it into the master branch using CI/CD, you avoid this convoluted merge process. You will get instant visibility into potential problems with new code integrations, allowing your development team to stop and collaborate to overcome the problem quickly. By using this approach to minimize the use of feature branches, it will be much easier for your development team to integrate code in real time, ensuring it’s working.
Implement your DevOps strategy with Trianz
Trianz is a leading DevOps management consulting firm experienced in helping our clients overcome DevOps integration challenges. We can help you foster a collaborative work culture centered around DevOps and its pioneering development and operational philosophies.
Get in touch with our DevOps integration team to start building a collaborative service development culture today.
