As many industries are going through a wave of digital transformation, a number of key technologies and principles are being deployed to business advantage. One such principle is DevOps.
This collaborative principle is proving to be extremely helpful for businesses in their pursuit of customer satisfaction and beating their competition.
The DevOps trend is growing, as cloud providers including AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are moving faster in upgrading their DevOps services and tools to address business needs.
According to a Google Cloud and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services report, “two-third of companies that use DevOps have seen benefits impacting their bottom line, including productivity (67 percent), increased speed to market (70 percent), innovation (66 percent), customer relevance (67 percent) and product/service quality (64 percent).”
While most companies are already reaping the benefits of DevOps practices, some organizations are still doing their homework. Here are seven tips to help you understand how your organization can use DevOps to its advantage:
Begin with a Small Project
It’s always best to start with a small project before you start engaging DevOps practices on a large scale. A pilot project will enable you to understand the core capabilities of the DevOps process and how you can map them to your business objectives.
Utilizing Open Source Tools
Using open source tools will keep you in touch with current trends and practices. Open source tools are easily available and easy to integrate. You can use these to enhance your DevOps experimentation.
Introducing Security
The DevOps process faces a threat in terms of security, which can be disruptive to an organization’s reputation. Hence, it is advisable for organizations to introduce security at the early stages of the DevOps process. Additionally, it saves a lot of time and resources, which are very crucial aspects of the DevOps process. The concept of DevSecOps is a wiser approach as it includes security all through the software development lifecycle (SDLC) process.
Make the Most of DevOps Best Practices
Looking for a process that drastically improves productivity and reduces time to market? DevOps best practices are designed to increase the pace of software development. With practices spanning site reliability engineering (SRE), end-to-end automation, continuous integration, testing and delivery, proactive monitoring and more, your team will be able to utilize their time effectively and devote their attention to other important business-driving processes.
Enhance Team Skills
The key to bringing out effective production results is having a skilled team that is equipped with the necessary training. Therefore, it is essential for organizations to provide their employees with a proper understanding of the organization goals in general and the processes employees are part of. According to the report, three-quarters of the best DevOps teams said they provide hands-on learning experiences with code labs and projects exercises.
Avoid the Blame Game
DevOps aims to bring about an increased pace of operations and fast learning, among employees. But most of the time for any new process to fall in place, individuals involved have to experience failure. And with the failure of the first project often comes the blame game. However, organizations need to understand that failure is the initial step to achieving future success. Moreover, firms should adopt the policy of “fail and adjust sooner.” The experience of learning from mistakes will take you farther along in your DevOps journey.
A DevOps-Friendly Environment
A DevOps-supportive culture is incomplete without the above exercises. Hence, it is essential that organizations bring about an environment that provides room for shared goals, improved transparency and making growth-driven decisions.
So, industry change-makers: Are you ready for your DevOps experience?
— Veritis