What is DevOps and How to Apply It

What is DevOps, and why are these practices important to your business? DevOps brings together development and operations, breaking down the silos that have existed between those teams.                                   

Developers still handle the development, operations still do operations – but in every project, there needs to be a hand-off between the two. We want that hand off to be as easy and repeatable as possible. It also needs to be something both sides agree upon. DevOps is not a tool or a single team’s job, it’s a mindset. Instead of thinking of coding issues vs. deployment issues, DevOps sees everyone as one big team working toward the same goal; deploying changes to production.  

"DevOps is not a tool or single team's job, it's a mindset"

-Christine Stone, Global PMO Lead, Groupon

DevOps Misconceptions 

The biggest misconception most people have about DevOps is the belief that it’s centered on the use of any specific tool. The tools will help make the process smoother, but they alone cannot solve your DevOps problems. If you add new tools, but both sides don’t agree to use them or only one of them has the proper access to them, then you haven’t really solved the problem. Instead, you just moved your existing problems to a new set of tools. Picking the right tools is a very important step in the process. Both sides need to agree on the tools and how they will be used. Getting that cross-team consensus is important because it will help your teams break down those silos.  

Another big misconception is that DevOps is one person or a single team’s problem. Adding one or more DevOps engineers is a great way to start the transformation and keep it running smoothly. However, the DevOps team should be focused on breaking down the silos, setting up and maintaining the tools, and helping define the pipelines. One of the things that the DevOps team should not be doing is deploying the code. If that’s the case, then you’re just potentially adding another handoff to your pipeline, which can actually be more detrimental. 

Benefits of DevOps 

Successful DevOps will bring a variety of benefits to your organization. Typically, you’ll be able to deploy changes quicker and with less fewer issues. When you’re conducting Agile development, you are going to want to do some type of release at the end of every sprint. If you don’t have a CI/CD pipeline with automated builds, tests, and deploys, it might still take an additional sprint to get that product released. The quick turnaround you’re trying to achieve ends up getting dragged out. You may be building it faster, but if it’s not actually getting released, then you probably aren’t getting the feedback that you need. This can also lead to issues/confusion where your users/stakeholders are seeing features at the end of the sprint that aren’t getting released into  production into production. 

Developing this process can also help cut down on issues. A manual flow makes it easier for steps to get missed or completed incorrectly, which can lead to finger-pointing between departments. If you’re following the principles of DevOps, you should have a clearly defined, repeatable pipeline. With DevOps, like Agile, you want to get feedback (especially about issues) to the people that care faster. A good pipeline will help generate that feedback and that feedback can come in the form of automated tests, code quality metrics, scanning for security issues, etc.  Catching these issues in your pipeline means that you are not missing them and later finding them in production. 

Where To Start With DevOps 

Before you begin, ensure that you have buy-in from the key stakeholders. If development brings in tools without the operation team being on board, then the pipeline is going to struggle to move beyond simple CI (continuous integration) tasks. If the operation team owns the tool chain and the development team isn’t on board, then you’re still probably looking at a manual handoff between the two teams. DevOps is a collaborative process, and you need ensure that everyone is agreement before you begin (otherwise you’re setting yourself up for a tougher road ahead).  

If you want to start implementing DevOps on your projects, I recommend following a “Crawl, Walk, Run” approach. Start small: pick a project that’s not critical but is important enough that you’re willing to put in the work to try this new process and make it successful. Start simple, even if that means adding manual steps, and then work on adding in automation and additional tools/steps. Focus on the basics, building, unit tests and deployments, and then you can add the additional steps to harden your pipeline after that. Once you have a solid initial pipeline, you can start to roll it out to other projects. The most important thing to remember is the process is always evolving. You can’t say, “We developed this process five years ago, and we don’t expect it to change.” There are going to be advancements, new tools, and other unexpected changes that will impact how your process needs to work, and you have to be ready to adapt and optimize along the way. 

From thought leadership to DevOps engineers, nvisia is here to help you build a pipeline and process that works for your team and bring your DevOps practice into reality.  Contact us today to learn more about how nvisia can help implement DevOps at your company. 

We've also included our own DevOps Guide below: 

• "2020 Guide to Smarter DevOps", click here to learn more on nvisia