Reduce Engineering Problems With a Resiliency Mindset - DZone DevOps

Resiliency isn’t something that just happens; it’s a result of dedication and hard work. To reach your optimal state of resilience, there are some crucial SRE best practices you should adopt to strengthen your processes.

Increase Cognitive Capacity With Runbooks

As you know, failure is not an option… because actually, it’s inevitable. Things will go wrong, especially with growing systems complexity and reliance on third-party service providers. You’ll need to be prepared to make the right decisions fast. There’s nothing worse than being called in the wee hours of a Sunday morning to handle a situation where thousands of dollars are going down the drain every second. Your brain is foggy, and you’ll likely need time to adjust to the extreme pressure of a critical incident. In these cases (and really, all cases where an incident is involved), incident runbooks can help guide you through the process and maximize the use of time.

According to Chris Taylor at Taksati Consulting, good incident runbooks help you cover all your bases. They typically include flowcharts and checklists to depict both the big picture and the minute details, a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) chart for each step, and a list of environmental influences that are unique to your system. To create your incident playbook, Chris recommends aggregating the following information:

• An inventory of relevant tools.
• The right personnel/subject matter experts to engage in response.
• Knowing the problem to solve, or the workflow you’re trying to document.
• Current state (whether this is a new process, or updating and old one).

By developing incident runbooks and practicing running through them, you’ll be more prepared for the inevitable.

Set SLOs to Guide Change Management

Change management is often done haphazardly, if at all. This means that organizations are unable to manage the risk of pushing new code, possibly leading to more incidents. Rather than employ ITIL’s arduous CAB method, SRE seeks to empower teams to push code according to their own schedule while still managing risk. To do this, SRE uses SLOs and error budgets.

SLOs, or service level objectives, are internal goals for service availability and speed that are set according to customer needs. These SLOs serve as a benchmark for safety. Each month, you have a certain allowable amount of downtime determined by your SLO. You can use this downtime to push new features.

If a feature is at risk for exceeding your error budget, it cannot be pushed until the next window. If the feature is low to no risk to your SLO, then you can push it. Each month teams should aspire to use the entirety, but not exceed, their error budgets. This way, your organization can optimize for innovation, but do so safely without risking unacceptable levels of customer impact.

Plan Ahead for Fluctuations in Capacity

Black Friday outages, scaling, moving to cloud. All of these big events required heightened capacity planning. If you don’t have enough load balancers on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you might be sunk. Or, if your company is simply growing quickly, you’ll need to adopt best practices to make sure that your team has everything it needs to be successful. There are two types of demand that require additional capacity: the first is organic demand (this is your organization’s natural growth) and inorganic demand (this is the growth that happens due to a marketing campaign or holiday. To prepare for these events, you’ll need to forecast the demand and plan time for acquisition.

Important facets of capacity planning include regular load testing and accurate provisioning. Regular load testing allows you to see how your system is operating under the average strain of daily users. As Google SRE Stephen Thorne writes, “It’s important to know that when you reach boundary conditions (such as CPU starvation or memory limits) things can go catastrophic, so sometimes it’s important to know where those limits are.” If your service is struggling to load balance, or the CPU usage is through the roof, you know that you’ll need to add capacity in the event of increased demand. That’s where provisioning comes in.

Adding capacity in any form can be expensive, so knowing where you need additional resources is key. It’s important to routinely plan for inorganic demand so you have time to provision correctly. The process of adding capacity can sometimes be a lengthy effort, especially if it’s the case of moving to cloud. You’ll also need to know how many hands you’ll need on deck for these momentous occasions.

Resiliency doesn’t just exist in your processes — it also exists in your people. Capacity planning is an important part of having a resilient system because in thinking about the allocation of resources, your team members matter. They need time off for holidays, personal vacations, and the obligatory annual cold. When you fail to plan for time off, you won’t have enough hands on deck to handle incidents as they occur. Denying people time off is obviously not the answer, as that will only lead to burnout and churn. So it’s important to develop a capacity plan that can accommodate people being, well, people.

Johann Strasser shares four steps you can take to develop a capacity plan that will eliminate staffing insecurity:

1. Establish all necessary processes with the appropriate staff – from top management to team leaders. Decide how often you will need to revise/revisit this process and make sure that everyone is in agreement on this.
2. Provide for complete and up-to-date project data and prioritize your projects. What projects are the most important, and which can be put on the back burner for now? Additionally, how long will each project take? You’ll need this data to be able to move forward with accurate plans.
3. Identify the capacities across your existing team, as well as your infrastructure and services. Is the team equipped and system architected in a way that minimizes performance regressions, to protect efficiency and capacity?
4. Consolidate the requirements (step 2) and the capacities (step 3). Identify underload as well as overload and try to balance them.

So, now you’ve got the people and the process, but how can you learn and improve on your resilience? For that, you’ll need great retrospective practices in place that facilitate real introspection, psychological safety, and forward-looking accountability.

#devops #sre #resilience #runbooks

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TOP 11 SKILLS TO LOOK OUT FOR WHILE HIRING DEVOPS ENGINEERS

Companies that incorporate DevOps practices get more done. It is as simple as that. The technical benefits include continuous delivery, easier management, easier to manage, and faster problem solving. In addition to this, there are cultural benefits like more productive teams, better employee engagement, and better development opportunities.

With these wide ranging benefits, it comes as no surprise that the future looks eminent for companies using DevOps practices. The market looks good too. According to Markets and Markets,

DevOps market size was at $2.9 Billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $10.31 Billion by 2023.
The CAGR expected to be exhibited by the market is 7%.

This growth is due to the added business benefits of faster feature delivery, much more stable operating environments, improved collaboration, better communication, and more time to innovate rather than fix or maintain.

The DevOps ecosystem is riddled with industry leaders such as CA Technologies, Atlassian, Microsoft, XebiaLabs, CollabNet, Rachspace, Perforce, and Clarive among others. With the industry leaders adopting this culture, it is only a matter of time before DevOps becomes the standard practice of integrating development and operations to ensure a smoother workflow.

If you have decided to restructure your workflow using the more efficient DevOps architecture, you will need to hire the best DevOps engineers that the market has to offer. Here, we will discuss the various aspects that need to be evaluated in order to estimate the proficiency of the developer that you intend to hire.

11 SKILLS TO LOOK FOR IN A DEVOPS ENGINEER

According to “Enterprise DevOps Skills” Report, there are 7 skill spheres that are most important when it comes to DevOps engineers. The list includes automation skills, process skills, soft skills, functional knowledge, specific automation, business skills, and specific certifications. However, we have gone one step further to include 11 specific skill sets needed for a DevOps engineer. This is not an exhaustive list, this is an unavoidable list.

LINUX FUNDAMENTALS

Configuration management DevOps tools like Chef, Ansible, and Puppet have based their architecture on the Linux master nodes. For infrastructure automation, having Linux experience is crucial.

10 CRUCIAL DEVOPS TOOLS

These tools come under the spheres of collaboration, issue tracking, cloud/IaaS/PaaS, CI/CD, package managers, source control, continuous testing, release orchestration, monitoring, and analytics.

CI/CD

Continuous integration and continuous delivery is the soul of DevOps. A better understanding of this principle helps the engineer to deliver high quality products at a faster pace.

IAC

In the DevOps community, Infrastructure as Code is the latest practice. Through abstraction to a high level programming language, this practice helps in managing infrastructures. It aids the applications of version control, tracking, and repository storing.

KEY CONCEPTS

The traditional silos between business, development, and operations are eliminated by the integration of DevOps. The key concept is to create a cross-functional environment of better collaboration and a seamless workflow. The engineer must have grasped this idea completely and do away with time wasters like code transfer between teams and also be proficient in automating most of the tasks.

SOFT SKILLS

Since collaboration is key for DevOps to function in its entire glory, soft skills are as necessary as technical expertise. Soft skills include communication, listening, self control assertiveness, conflict resolution, empathy, positive attitude, and taking ownership.

CUSTOMER CENTRICITY

The engineer must be able to put themselves in the shoes of the customer and take decisions that address the consumer demands.

SECURITY

Speed, automation, and quality is the core of DevOps. This is where the secure practice of DevSecOps comes takes form. With increased coding speed, vulnerabilities follow. The engineer must be equipped to write codes that are protected from various attacks and vulnerabilities.

FLEXIBILITY

The engineer must have immense knowledge about the ever evolving tech and have the capacity to work with the latest tools and stacks. They should also have the prowess to integrate, test, release, and deploy each project.

COLLABORATION

Active collaboration is needed to streamline the workflow pouring in from the cross functional environment consisting of developers, programmers, and business teams. There should be transparency and a clear cut communication between the engineers.

AGILE

Every DevOps practitioner must root their philosophy in the Agile method. The 4 values and 12 principles of the Agile framework must be followed at all times.

Making sure that your new hire has these skill sets adds to the value of your DevOps integration. However, if you plan on hiring a dedicated DevOps team for your business, look no further because you have come to the right place.

Orion eSolutions takes immense pride in the quality of our DevOps engineers we nurture and we rightfully boast the standard of our outputs. If you are wondering if we sport all the skills mentioned above, we go much beyond that. Let us clear your doubts.

WHY ORION SHOULD BE YOUR DEVOPS DEVELOPMENT COMPANY

Through a robust use of resources and time, we ensure the highest output possible through DevOps which is:

208 times more frequent code deployments.
106 times faster lead time from commit to deploy
2604 times faster time to recover from incidents
7 times lower change failure rate

We offer cost effective solutions with guaranteed expertise and reliability. And our workflow is as seamless as the output we provide. We understand your requirements and agree on a workflow, team size, deliverables and deadline. Then we put together the most viable team for your project and start delivering. Collaborate with us today to enjoy the power of collaboration through the most efficient DevOps engineers.

#devops engineers #devops development company #hire the best devops engineers #devops #hiring devops engineers

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

Reduce Engineering Problems With a Resiliency Mindset - DZone DevOps

Resiliency isn’t something that just happens; it’s a result of dedication and hard work. To reach your optimal state of resilience, there are some crucial SRE best practices you should adopt to strengthen your processes.

Increase Cognitive Capacity With Runbooks

As you know, failure is not an option… because actually, it’s inevitable. Things will go wrong, especially with growing systems complexity and reliance on third-party service providers. You’ll need to be prepared to make the right decisions fast. There’s nothing worse than being called in the wee hours of a Sunday morning to handle a situation where thousands of dollars are going down the drain every second. Your brain is foggy, and you’ll likely need time to adjust to the extreme pressure of a critical incident. In these cases (and really, all cases where an incident is involved), incident runbooks can help guide you through the process and maximize the use of time.

According to Chris Taylor at Taksati Consulting, good incident runbooks help you cover all your bases. They typically include flowcharts and checklists to depict both the big picture and the minute details, a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) chart for each step, and a list of environmental influences that are unique to your system. To create your incident playbook, Chris recommends aggregating the following information:

• An inventory of relevant tools.
• The right personnel/subject matter experts to engage in response.
• Knowing the problem to solve, or the workflow you’re trying to document.
• Current state (whether this is a new process, or updating and old one).

By developing incident runbooks and practicing running through them, you’ll be more prepared for the inevitable.

Set SLOs to Guide Change Management

Change management is often done haphazardly, if at all. This means that organizations are unable to manage the risk of pushing new code, possibly leading to more incidents. Rather than employ ITIL’s arduous CAB method, SRE seeks to empower teams to push code according to their own schedule while still managing risk. To do this, SRE uses SLOs and error budgets.

SLOs, or service level objectives, are internal goals for service availability and speed that are set according to customer needs. These SLOs serve as a benchmark for safety. Each month, you have a certain allowable amount of downtime determined by your SLO. You can use this downtime to push new features.

If a feature is at risk for exceeding your error budget, it cannot be pushed until the next window. If the feature is low to no risk to your SLO, then you can push it. Each month teams should aspire to use the entirety, but not exceed, their error budgets. This way, your organization can optimize for innovation, but do so safely without risking unacceptable levels of customer impact.

Plan Ahead for Fluctuations in Capacity

Black Friday outages, scaling, moving to cloud. All of these big events required heightened capacity planning. If you don’t have enough load balancers on Black Friday or Cyber Monday, you might be sunk. Or, if your company is simply growing quickly, you’ll need to adopt best practices to make sure that your team has everything it needs to be successful. There are two types of demand that require additional capacity: the first is organic demand (this is your organization’s natural growth) and inorganic demand (this is the growth that happens due to a marketing campaign or holiday. To prepare for these events, you’ll need to forecast the demand and plan time for acquisition.

Important facets of capacity planning include regular load testing and accurate provisioning. Regular load testing allows you to see how your system is operating under the average strain of daily users. As Google SRE Stephen Thorne writes, “It’s important to know that when you reach boundary conditions (such as CPU starvation or memory limits) things can go catastrophic, so sometimes it’s important to know where those limits are.” If your service is struggling to load balance, or the CPU usage is through the roof, you know that you’ll need to add capacity in the event of increased demand. That’s where provisioning comes in.

Adding capacity in any form can be expensive, so knowing where you need additional resources is key. It’s important to routinely plan for inorganic demand so you have time to provision correctly. The process of adding capacity can sometimes be a lengthy effort, especially if it’s the case of moving to cloud. You’ll also need to know how many hands you’ll need on deck for these momentous occasions.

Resiliency doesn’t just exist in your processes — it also exists in your people. Capacity planning is an important part of having a resilient system because in thinking about the allocation of resources, your team members matter. They need time off for holidays, personal vacations, and the obligatory annual cold. When you fail to plan for time off, you won’t have enough hands on deck to handle incidents as they occur. Denying people time off is obviously not the answer, as that will only lead to burnout and churn. So it’s important to develop a capacity plan that can accommodate people being, well, people.

Johann Strasser shares four steps you can take to develop a capacity plan that will eliminate staffing insecurity:

1. Establish all necessary processes with the appropriate staff – from top management to team leaders. Decide how often you will need to revise/revisit this process and make sure that everyone is in agreement on this.
2. Provide for complete and up-to-date project data and prioritize your projects. What projects are the most important, and which can be put on the back burner for now? Additionally, how long will each project take? You’ll need this data to be able to move forward with accurate plans.
3. Identify the capacities across your existing team, as well as your infrastructure and services. Is the team equipped and system architected in a way that minimizes performance regressions, to protect efficiency and capacity?
4. Consolidate the requirements (step 2) and the capacities (step 3). Identify underload as well as overload and try to balance them.

So, now you’ve got the people and the process, but how can you learn and improve on your resilience? For that, you’ll need great retrospective practices in place that facilitate real introspection, psychological safety, and forward-looking accountability.

#devops #sre #resilience #runbooks

Why You Should Be Adopting a DevOps Culture in 2020 - DZone DevOps

The year 2020 has arrived, and its arrival brings a lot of innovations and transformations in the Information and Technology (IT) sector and especially to DevOps technologies. The study conducted by experts at Grand View Research says that the DevOps market is anticipated to be worth 12.85 billion USD by 2025. The adoption of DevOps practices rose 17% in 2018 as compared to 10% in 2017, according to Statista. It has been seen that top organizations that have included DevOps practices in their Software Development cycle have experienced a 63% improvement in the quality of software deployments. Due to Agile adoption, 63% frequency in the release of new versions of software! Also, higher standards of coding have been observed.

Benefits of DevOps

• Quick amendment response during the development phase.
• Adapting Agile made easy.
• It is a perfect route for collaboration between teams.
• Iterations help in identifying bugs and their quick resolution.
• Teams can focus more on development and be free from deployment worries.
• Resilient services by teams.
• Cross skilling of teams and better self-improvement Faster time to market.
• It improves the quality of the product.

The market for DevOps is being driven by the increased adoption of Agile methodologies, cloud technologies, rising digitisation, and business automation. Adopting DevOps in the IT culture is a necessity for better team collaborations. So is your business ready to embrace DevOps culture in 2020? Various tools available for DevOps are Docker, Jenkins, GIT, etc. You can always take assistance from Cloud DevOps Consultants or DevOps service providers. If you want to know more about DevOps trends in 2020, then keep reading.

Also Read - Chief Trends Predicted in 2020 to Shape Autonomous Digital Enterprises

The Shift of Winds from CI- Pipelines to DevOps Assembly Lines in 2020

The trends show the interests of the IT industry in CI as the only tool for deployments is slowing down. Continuous Integration (CI) is the process that automates build and runs unit tests on each PUSH of code. CI-Pipelines only work in segments. In order for all the teams to collaborate better, there is a need for automation of CI along with Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment of the code and binaries to the target environments. That is where DevOps comes into the picture to improve the process of planning, coding, and automation of delivery and deployment.

**Related Reading - **How to Setup a CI/CD Pipeline with Kubernetes 2020

Embedded Security on Top of List

Cyber security is one of the vital concerns for IT corporations. DevOps is going to be spending a lot of resources on security. The term being used is DevSecOps. The increase in the need for security has made the integration of security in the application development process necessary. By this measure, the vulnerabilities will decrease, and the whole process will be effective, secure, and efficient.

Need for Server-Less Architecture

There will be a simplification of operations with the server-less architecture used by DevOps teams. Legacy systems are being upgraded to server-less operations with solutions like Google Functions, AWS Lambda, and Microsoft’s Azure Functions. This change is cost-effective and also improves the experience of users. This server-less architecture will be the go-to architecture for developers to increase productivity and will need DevOps automation more than ever.

The Future Is Zero-Touch Automation

Zero-touch automation is the future of DevOps automation. There will be no need for human intervention when machine learning is utilized to automate the back-up of vast data fully. The companies which have already implemented or adapted DevOps have seen a significant increase in productivity and faster rates of deployment. Understanding the DevOps cycle and administering automation between all the blocks of sequences.

Shift to Cloud-Native DevOps

There will be an accelerated shift to Cloud-native DevOps since all the enterprises are moving to Cloud-based enterprise products. Cloud adoption ensures flexibility, less downtime, reduces infrastructure expenditures. Gartner predicts that shift to the cloud by 2022 will effect 1.3 Trillion USD of IT industry spending directly or indirectly. Many companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon provide cloud computing and storage facilities and smooth operations. These companies are seeing a massive spike in other enterprises looking for their cloud services for faster changes in production.

#devops adoption #devops and agile #devops 2020 #devops benefits #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