Explore the DevOps journey

• 4 minutes

Remember, the goal is to shorten cycle time. Start with the release pipeline. How long does it take to deploy a change of one line of code or configuration? Ultimately, that is the brake on your velocity.

• Continuous Integration drives the ongoing merging and testing of code, leading to an early finding of defects. Other benefits include less time wasted fighting merge issues and rapid feedback for development teams.

• Continuous Delivery of software solutions to production and testing environments helps organizations quickly fix bugs and respond to ever-changing business requirements.

• Version Control, usually with a Git-based Repository, enables teams worldwide to communicate effectively during daily development activities. Also, integrate with software development tools for monitoring activities such as deployments.

• Use Agile planning and lean project management techniques to:

  • Plan and isolate work into sprints.
  • Manage team capacity and help teams quickly adapt to changing business needs.
  • A DevOps Definition of Done is working software collecting telemetry against the intended business goals.

• Monitoring and Logging of running applications. Including production environments for application health and customer usage. It helps organizations create a hypothesis and quickly validate or disprove strategies. Rich data is captured and stored in various logging formats.

• Public and Hybrid Clouds have made the impossible easy. The cloud has removed traditional bottlenecks and helped commoditize Infrastructure. You can use Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to lift and shift your existing apps or Platform as a Service (PaaS) to gain unprecedented productivity. The cloud gives you a data center without limits.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Enables the automation and validation of the creation and teardown of environments to help deliver secure and stable application hosting platforms.

• Use Microservices architecture to isolate business use cases into small reusable services that communicate via interface contracts. This architecture enables scalability and efficiency.

• Containers are the next evolution in virtualization. They're much more lightweight than virtual machines, allow much faster hydration, and easily configure files.

DevOps may hurt at first.

If it hurts, do it more often. Adopting new practices like going to the gym is likely to hurt first. The more you exercise the new techniques, the easier they'll become.

Like training at the gym, where you first exercise large muscles before small muscles, adopt practices that have the most significant impact. Cross-train to develop synergy.