DevOps is a great approach to software development processes. It allows making the whole infrastructure efficient, reduces costs and provides the product to the market faster. In general, DevOps transformation increases a company’s competitiveness, so DevOps implementation is really a great decision for your business.
Almost every business owner wants to understand internal processes, so today we want you to understand the steps of implementation of DevOps services and internal work of DevOps transformation.
DevOps assessment and transformation
There was a Waterfall methodology before the DevOps coming. The Waterfall is an unwieldy strictly planned model of software development. In Waterfall, developers write a code for a long time, after that Quality Assurance (QA) engineers make tests and if the testing succeeds , IT Operations engineers deploy the project. This is a good approach but the releases in Waterfall are very rare. If code has some bugs (it definitely has), QA engineer gives it back to developers and the cycle is repeated.
DevOps approach has totally reconfigured this situation and provides frequent releases. It is possible because of writing and testing code in small batches. Thus said, the developer writes the code, QA engineer tests it and after successful testing code deploys. Also, DevOps provides the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) which means DevOps engineer makes the environment at once and writes a textual description of the deployment environment. This record is written in descriptive language and put in a textual file called manifest. So, the developer can change some parameters and receive different environments if needed. It significantly simplifies testing and deployment. In DevOps culture, this is called CI/CD pipeline. It means Continuous Integration and Deployment. Thus said, every new feature can be released in a few weeks unlike the Waterfall, which provides long processes for half of year and more. So, how is it going?
DevOps transformation strategy
There are some common steps that DevOps company provides in your project. They can be different depending on the company’s needs, but we will list the main points below.
- DevOps assessment. This is the first step of DevOps transformation. At this step, the DevOps team needs to understand the main project goals, requirements and the current state of infrastructure and make a preliminary plan of further work.
- Project onboarding. At this step, the team learns all available project documentation and starts to interact with the project.
- Optimization. It can include multiple steps that improve the current system and make it more efficient. It can include cloud migration. providing new tools, etc.
- Performance bottleneck. If the system doesn’t need a lot of changes, the DevOps team needs to improve the current infrastructure by looking for bottlenecks and removing them.
- Redesigning of current infrastructure. It can be a part of optimization. This is not a required step but it is often important for legacy systems or if a project needs cloud migration. It is a common case that versions of on-prem software are incompatible with cloud versions. That’s why the system might need a redesign of infrastructure. Sometimes the system is so outdated that it is impossible to make DevOps transformation. In this case, the team also redesigns the infrastructure from scratch.
- Providing necessary tools. At this step, the DevOps team can create the IaC and CI/CD pipelines using appropriate tools. After that, you’ll get an automated software delivery process.
- Teamwork. Even the greatest methodology wouldn’t work without changing the team mentality. At this step, the DevOps team introduces the in-house project team to tools, technologies and DevOps culture as it is.
- Monitoring, logging and maintenance. DevOps methodology also includes Continuous Monitoring and Logging as part of the DevOps cycle. It means the system can automatically gather information about the server breaks and other problems. If the problem is repeated, DevOps engineer solves it. So, when the project ends you might not be saying goodbye for your DevOps team and continue to work together.
Final thoughts about DevOps transformation and DevOps tasks
As you can understand, DevOps is quite a lucrative way to increase the efficiency of your software development processes. You’ll get the cost-efficiency and frequent releases. DevOps increases competitiveness in the market very well.
If you want to implement the DevOps in your company, you should refer to the Managed Service Provider (MSP). Such companies provide DevOps services and can implement the DevOps culture in your company. When you look for MSP try to find feedback from previous customers and ask MSP about successful cases. This will give understanding about common goals and fields the MSP work with.
It any case, don’t be afraid of DevOps transformation, it will remarkably improve your company’s performance.