DevOps is buzz word now a days and companies are moving to DevOps methodologies as a part of Digital transformation. No doubt, it brings the Dev and Ops work together and brings more agility to the software development and increases the business growth as well. DevOps and Agile are so important when it comes to software development, testing and deployment but sometimes I feel is this really important ? Does it really brings the revenue growth and capture the market with early software delivery ? Lets understand
Obviously , DevOps is not a technology but it is a paradigm OR discipline which streamline the organization culture to the common goal and aligns all the teams to deliver that goal. The goal is,
To delight the customer with quality software
Benefits of DevOps
- Increases the productivity using Automation
Automation is key pillar in DevOps. In entire software development process , identify what are the different and repetitive manual tasks and try to automate those using automation framework and scripts. Certain automation best practices has to be followed to make the automation production grade, otherwise it can be nightmare. Don’t try to automate everything, that’s not our goal. Only automate those things which are really needed. There has to be due diligence phase to understand what all possible automation gaps and target those.
- Involves all the business stakeholders.
DevOps breaks the silos. it brings all the functions together and be effectively contribute to it. Right from requirement gathering to customer delivery, all stakeholders are involved and are equally responsible for success OR failure of product delivery. This ensures that we have right team involved at right time. Without DevOps , it was way difficult to organize all teams on common platform.
- CICD pipeline brings speed to the software development and deployment.
Continuous integration and continuous deployment are another key pillars in DevOps. Automated CICD pipelines along with right tools and framework significantly improves the speed and performance of the development process. you can rollback any previous feature at any time. It include test cycles, bring more environments altogether in the process. This tear down the common problem of “code works in my dev environment but not in your CICD pipeline” .
- Common “Definition of Done”
OK, So what is definition of done. it is, “The culture OR morality which binds the responsibility of each team member in the team till every feature of the product/software gets delivered in production environment with no issues.”. For e.g., once the feature is developed and goes into testing pipeline, the responsibility of developer is not finished. He OR She cant say, my job is done, unless that feature works in production environment without issues. Definition of done matters lot. every team has definition of done but that should not lead to specific deliveries per team . As a enterprise level delivery for product, we need to be more vigilant so that all teams can work together to achieve delivery.
- what matters most : People
For every organization , most important asset is people. Having right direction with right mindset matters lot. In any large organization , there are issues , silos, but one common thing is ultimate goal, “Software delivery” so , we need to focus on people and keep motivating them to achieve awesome.
Challenges in DevOps
There are many challenges in DevOps. Few are listed below but the major one is, finding right skills human resource and mentality to change the way we are developing software since edges.
- Cost
Nothing comes free and obviously quality does not come free of cost. Cost is major factor in any organization when it comes to transformation and to implement right DevOps methodology we need to consider the right tools and technologies. There are many open source and licensed tools available in the market to implement the CICD pipeline but to select right tools and framework for CICD pipeline we may need to invest some cost.
- Complexity
Complexity is another challenge. As the teams are coming together, high chances of popping up issues, getting more worse to solve issues and meet the deadline. Another complexity is, selecting the right tools, as I mentioned earlier, there are many open source and licensed tools available in the market.
- Right Metrics
Choosing the right metrics to understand and measure the DevOps progress is crucial. Every organization has maturity and metrics model to understand the progress but is difficult to maintain. In my opinion, the leadership team has to come up with strong metrics model and every induvial team has to adhere to that to pass on the production deployment.
Conclusion
In summary, though there are challenges to implement and execute the DevOps model, yes DevOps is really important for the benefit of organization as well as customer. it is a win-win situation. Good Luck.
great work