Applying the Three Ways of DevOps to Accelerate Your Organization

Introduction

The emergence of DevOps has marked a seismic shift in the software world in recent years. The allure is the opportunity it offers to organizations to increase their levels of productivity by orders of magnitude and outpace their competitors to win in the marketplace.

However, DevOps draws from a wide array of areas of research and represents their convergence into a broad set of philosophies, practices, and tools. With such a vast body of knowledge to consider, it’s hard to know where to begin when attempting to adopt it.

Fortunately, we can look to DevOps thought leaders to point us in the right direction. First introduced in The Phoenix ProjectandThe DevOps Handbook is the concept of _The Three Ways. _Itcaptures the conceptual underpinnings of the entire movement. This model is a powerful tool that identifies the characteristics of DevOps maturity and describes the path that your organization can follow to get there.

We’ll be leveraging The Three Ways in this article by examining some practical actions your organization can take while pursuing DevOps maturity. It can help when the purported benefits of DevOps seem elusive. This feeling burdens organizations that struggle with the underlying principles of DevOps.

We’ll discuss in more detail, within the context of The Three Ways to provide the insight necessary to fight past barriers to adoption. As with any cultural transformation, the adoption of DevOps requires a shift in mindset and values embodied by specific practices and approaches. This guide is a collection of ideas to get started or to strategize about potential next steps. It can be used by any technology professional at any level of your organization to accelerate or even begin its DevOps journey.

The Three Ways

The First Way

The First Way is about accelerating the pace of delivery through your value stream. It can encompass the work of an individual contributor, a team, or even an entire organization. It describes how the business defines value-creating functionality for the development organization. Development builds the software that captures the value and passes it to operations to deliver it as a service to the customer.

The arrow only points from left to right, suggesting that there is never a backward flow. The implication is that known defects never get passed downstream, never negatively impacting the whole system with local optimization, and always pursuing greater throughput by continuously unlocking a greater understanding of the system to improve it.

Figure 1. The First Way flows from left to right.

The Second Way

In The Second Way, your organization will establish a feedback loop that amplifies signals of quality and efficiency and enables the practice of continually making improvements by addressing any uncovered issues. You create a virtuous cycle of refinement, which allows a better understanding of customer needs and faster detection of problems, ideally moving to the predictive phase to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place.

Now you can begin the work of shortening the feedback cycle, which paves the way to add even more sensing mechanisms to detect weaker signals. By “sensing mechanisms,” we mean ways to inform developers or operations of issues occurring in production. “Weaker signals” refers to different characteristics of the running software that provides insight into the quality, stability, or other essential aspects of the system.

_The Second Way _helps your organization be proactive by reacting to predictive indicators of problems and addressing them before problems occur. Most of the detection mechanisms can be automated, which eliminates waste and helps your entire organization move faster without fear of breaking something.

Figure 2. The Second Way is a feedback loop that drives continuous improvement

The Third Way

As your organization leverages the apparatus created in _The First _and _Second Way_s, The Third Way revolves around the idea of enabling rapid experimentation for an even more in-depth understanding of customer needs. Since the apparatus is all-around promoting a fast flow, prevention of issues, and recovery from problems, organizations can take more chances in The Third Way and can conduct bold experiments right in production.

The cultural impacts of these concepts are apparent in several practices. Teams able to begin their journey on The Third Way regularly allocate time for improving daily work. They may also intentionally introduce faults into the system to test their ability to respond and recover to improve the system and their skills. Organizations will also reward bold experimentation for fostering innovation, nurturing learning, and embedding courageous behaviour into their cultural DNA.

#agile #organizational-change #the-three-ways #devops

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How to Extend your DevOps Strategy For Success in the Cloud?

DevOps and Cloud computing are joined at the hip, now that fact is well appreciated by the organizations that engaged in SaaS cloud and developed applications in the Cloud. During the COVID crisis period, most of the organizations have started using cloud computing services and implementing a cloud-first strategy to establish their remote operations. Similarly, the extended DevOps strategy will make the development process more agile with automated test cases.

According to the survey in EMEA, IT decision-makers have observed a 129%* improvement in the overall software development process when performing DevOps on the Cloud. This success result was just 81% when practicing only DevOps and 67%* when leveraging Cloud without DevOps. Not only that, but the practice has also made the software predictability better, improve the customer experience as well as speed up software delivery 2.6* times faster.

3 Core Principle to fit DevOps Strategy

If you consider implementing DevOps in concert with the Cloud, then the

below core principle will guide you to utilize the strategy.

• It is indispensable to follow a continuous process, including all stages from Dev to deploy with the help of auto-provisioning resources of the target platform.
• The team always keeps an eye on major and minor application changes that can typically appear within a few hours of development to operation. However, the support of unlimited resource provisioning is needed at the stage of deployment.
• Cloud or hybrid configuration can associate this process, but you must confirm that configuration should support multiple cloud brands like Microsoft, AWS, Google, any public and private cloud models.

Guide to Remold Business with DevOps and Cloud

Companies are now re-inventing themselves to become better at sensing the next big thing their customers need and finding ways with the Cloud based DevOps to get ahead of the competition.

#devops #devops-principles #azure-devops #devops-transformation #good-company #devops-tools #devops-top-story #devops-infrastructure

Applying the Three Ways of DevOps to Accelerate Your Organization

Introduction

The emergence of DevOps has marked a seismic shift in the software world in recent years. The allure is the opportunity it offers to organizations to increase their levels of productivity by orders of magnitude and outpace their competitors to win in the marketplace.

However, DevOps draws from a wide array of areas of research and represents their convergence into a broad set of philosophies, practices, and tools. With such a vast body of knowledge to consider, it’s hard to know where to begin when attempting to adopt it.

Fortunately, we can look to DevOps thought leaders to point us in the right direction. First introduced in The Phoenix ProjectandThe DevOps Handbook is the concept of _The Three Ways. _Itcaptures the conceptual underpinnings of the entire movement. This model is a powerful tool that identifies the characteristics of DevOps maturity and describes the path that your organization can follow to get there.

We’ll be leveraging The Three Ways in this article by examining some practical actions your organization can take while pursuing DevOps maturity. It can help when the purported benefits of DevOps seem elusive. This feeling burdens organizations that struggle with the underlying principles of DevOps.

We’ll discuss in more detail, within the context of The Three Ways to provide the insight necessary to fight past barriers to adoption. As with any cultural transformation, the adoption of DevOps requires a shift in mindset and values embodied by specific practices and approaches. This guide is a collection of ideas to get started or to strategize about potential next steps. It can be used by any technology professional at any level of your organization to accelerate or even begin its DevOps journey.

The Three Ways

The First Way

The First Way is about accelerating the pace of delivery through your value stream. It can encompass the work of an individual contributor, a team, or even an entire organization. It describes how the business defines value-creating functionality for the development organization. Development builds the software that captures the value and passes it to operations to deliver it as a service to the customer.

The arrow only points from left to right, suggesting that there is never a backward flow. The implication is that known defects never get passed downstream, never negatively impacting the whole system with local optimization, and always pursuing greater throughput by continuously unlocking a greater understanding of the system to improve it.

Figure 1. The First Way flows from left to right.

The Second Way

In The Second Way, your organization will establish a feedback loop that amplifies signals of quality and efficiency and enables the practice of continually making improvements by addressing any uncovered issues. You create a virtuous cycle of refinement, which allows a better understanding of customer needs and faster detection of problems, ideally moving to the predictive phase to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place.

Now you can begin the work of shortening the feedback cycle, which paves the way to add even more sensing mechanisms to detect weaker signals. By “sensing mechanisms,” we mean ways to inform developers or operations of issues occurring in production. “Weaker signals” refers to different characteristics of the running software that provides insight into the quality, stability, or other essential aspects of the system.

_The Second Way _helps your organization be proactive by reacting to predictive indicators of problems and addressing them before problems occur. Most of the detection mechanisms can be automated, which eliminates waste and helps your entire organization move faster without fear of breaking something.

Figure 2. The Second Way is a feedback loop that drives continuous improvement

The Third Way

As your organization leverages the apparatus created in _The First _and _Second Way_s, The Third Way revolves around the idea of enabling rapid experimentation for an even more in-depth understanding of customer needs. Since the apparatus is all-around promoting a fast flow, prevention of issues, and recovery from problems, organizations can take more chances in The Third Way and can conduct bold experiments right in production.

The cultural impacts of these concepts are apparent in several practices. Teams able to begin their journey on The Third Way regularly allocate time for improving daily work. They may also intentionally introduce faults into the system to test their ability to respond and recover to improve the system and their skills. Organizations will also reward bold experimentation for fostering innovation, nurturing learning, and embedding courageous behaviour into their cultural DNA.

#agile #organizational-change #the-three-ways #devops

DevOps Basics: What You Should Know

Once an industry term becomes popular, particularly in technology, it can be difficult to get an accurate definition. Everyone assumes that the basics are common knowledge and moves on. However, if your company has been discussing DevOps, or if you are interested in learning more about it, here are some basics you should know.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps refers to the restructuring of the traditional software application cycle to support Agile development and continuous improvement/continuous delivery. Traditionally, the software was created in large-scale, monolithic bundles. New features and new releases were created in large packages and released in full-scale, infrequent, major deployments.

This structure is no longer effective in the modern business environment. Companies are under increasing pressure to be agile. They must respond rapidly to changes in the business environment to remain competitive. Software development needs to be completely changed as a process so that incremental improvements can be made frequently – ideally, several times per day.

However, changing a development lifecycle completely requires major changes – in people and culture, process, and enabling tooling – to be effective. DevOps was created by the breaking down of cycles between development and operations, combining two separate functions in application development. These changes intend to support agile, secure, continuous improvements, and frequent releases.

#devops #devops adoption #devops benefits #q& #a #devops goals #devops migration #devops questions

Measuring DevOps Metrics: A How-To Guide

DevOps is supposed to help streamline the process of taking code changes and getting them to production for users to enjoy. But what exactly does it mean for the process to be “streamlined”? One way to answer this is to start measuring metrics.

Why metrics are important to track

Metrics give us a way to make sure our quality stays the same over time because we have numbers and key identifiers to compare against. Without any metrics being measured, you don’t have a way to measure improvements or regressions. You just have to react to them as they come up.

When you know the indicators that show what condition your system is in, it lets you catch issues faster than if you don’t have a steady-state to compare to. This also helps when you get ready for system upgrades. You’ll be able to give more accurate estimates of the number of resources your systems use.

After you’ve recorded some key metrics for a while, you’ll start noticing places you could improve your application or ways you can reallocate resources to where they are needed more. Knowing the normal operating state of your system’s pipeline is crucial and it takes time to set up a monitoring tool.

The main thing is that you decide to watch some metrics to get an idea of what’s going on when you start the deploy process. In the beginning, it might seem hard to figure out what the best metrics for a pipeline are.

Figuring out which metrics are important to you

You can conduct chaos engineering experiments to test different conditions and learn more about which metrics are the most important to your system. You can look at things like, time from build to deploy, number of bugs that get caught in different phases of the pipeline, and build size.

Thinking about what you should measure can be one of the harder parts of the effectiveness of the metrics you choose. When you’re considering metrics, look at what the most important results of your pipeline are.

Do you need your app to get through the process as quickly as possible, regardless of errors? Can you figure out why that sporadic issue keeps stopping the deploy process? What’s blocking you from getting your changes to production with confidence?

That’s how you’re going to find those key metrics quickly. Running experiments and looking at common deploy problems will show you what’s important early on. This is one of the ways you can make sure that your metrics are relevant.

#devops #devops-principles #devops-tools #devops-challenges #devops-adoption-challenges #devops-adoption #continuous-deployment #continuous-integration

What is DevOps Lifecycle? | How to manage yours

From conceptualization to deployment, the process of developing software applications or web applications is complex. By going through several intricate phases of development, a web application or software is tested on multiple levels before being proceeded into production.

In most cases, software application development becomes time-consuming due to its specifications and complexities. In order to deliver the application in a short span of time, software developers are following a universal set of practices called the DevOps lifecycle.

So, what is DevOps in the world of software application development? Let’s deep dive into its meaning, uses, as well as each critical phase in the DevOps lifecycle.

#devops #devops tutorial #devops lifecycle tools #devops lifecycle blocks #devops lifecycle phases #lifecycle of devops