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DevOps is a philosophy and methodology that aims to align application development and operations teams with the goal of creating a culture of automation, collaboration and measurement. This approach allows organizations to improve their ability to respond to changes in the market and customer demand while reducing operational risk.
It can be challenging for companies that have never adopted DevOps before or those that haven’t fully embraced its concepts. Here are some areas where you should focus when adopting DevOps while leveraging an outsourcing partner:
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a software development methodology that aims to increase the flow of collaboration and communication between developers and IT operations staff. The goal is to create a culture within an organization where both groups work together in harmony, providing feedback on each other’s work and operating as one unified team.
The purpose of DevOps is to improve the speed at which applications are brought into production while ensuring their quality. This can be achieved by introducing better practices around automation and continuous integration, testing and monitoring; by improving collaboration between teams; or by following a lean approach that focuses on constant improvement throughout all areas of your business.
Transversal business impact through Software Delivery and Operational performance
When you adopt DevOps, your focus should be on the business impact of SDO performance. The goals of Software Delivery and Operational performance are to:
- Improve software change lead time
- Increase deployment frequency
- Decrease change fail rate and time to recover from failed deploys
- Increase availability and decrease mean time to restore (MTTR)
Using the Cloud right
- Leveraging the cloud helps improve SDO performance. Your team will be able to focus on value-added activities like improving service delivery, rather than having to spend time maintaining and configuring your own infrastructure.
- Service Operation improves availability and time to restore. Cloud providers offer environments that are designed for resiliency, so you don’t have to worry about building this yourself.
- Broad network access makes it easier for teams across your organization or even outside of it to participate in DevOps initiatives by connecting with other teams through a single portal instead of using email or another communication method that requires multiple steps before sharing information with colleagues from different departments or locations around the world.
- Resource Pooling allows you to use resources across different applications more efficiently than if each one had its own dedicated server—this results in faster deployments because there are fewer instances required compared with traditional development models like monolithic architectures which require separate servers per application!
Evolve your approach to Quality
One of the most important aspects of applying DevOps is to improve your approach to quality. Quality Assurance (QA) is about building quality into your product. This means that you should not wait until after the development cycle to begin testing and monitoring: instead, QA should be an integral part of every step in your software delivery process—from inception through production implementation. Continuous and automated testing play a key role in improving Software Delivery and Operational performance by reducing defects, eliminating manual processes, and enabling faster deployments.
Having a monitoring and observability solution also improves your SDO by enabling you to visualize metrics about how your applications are performing on a day-to-day basis or whether there are any issues that need addressing immediately so as not to disrupt user experience or cause downtime for critical systems like customer websites or IoT devices in manufacturing environments along with other critical infrastructure such as power grids where downtime can cost lives if left unaddressed quickly enough!
Culture
Culture is the key to DevOps, and it cannot be outsourced. Culture is an intangible asset that accelerates organizational learning and continuous evolution through learning and knowledge sharing. The culture you want to build should be one where there is an open, safe environment for learning; teams are allowed to make mistakes; retrospectives are used as part of the learning process; autonomy is given to teams and individuals; teams feel trusted by the organization; there’s a sense of purpose around what your team does.
When adopting DevOps by leveraging outsourcing, focus on these areas
When adopting DevOps by leveraging outsourcing, focus on these areas:
- Don’t ask your partner just for “DevOps Engineers.” Remember it’s not a job title—it’s a culture. Instead of hiring employees who happen to be good at both development and operations, create hybrid (your employees and your partner’s) multidisciplinary (development, testing, operations) teams with your partner structured for this new reality.
- Leverage each other’s strengths, your people have deep knowledge around your business, vertical, processes, context, architecture. Your partner’s people may bring in specialized technical skillsets around modern engineering practices, tools, processes that you want your people to internalize quickly.
- Understand the importance of teamwork and collaboration. The best way to build trust in your hybrid team is by getting them involved in every step of the process: from planning through implementation and delivery.
- Explore a nearshore option to leverage same time zone interactions, proven experience around DevOps transformations and capabilities combined with lower costs.
Conclusion
Ultimately, embracing DevOps is a journey and there are partners out there that can help you walk through part of it faster and avoid making expensive mistakes. But in the end it is not a responsibility you can completely outsource. Let’s talk if you want to explore how to take the first step.
