5 Things to keep in mind while planning DevOps

With the advancement of digital transformation, businesses are often required to address urgent needs and operate faster with more agility. DevOps (Development & Operations) is a unique software development approach for businesses which is already proven to be highly effective. Development teams and operation teams working in unison give businesses a competitive advantage by delivering a quality and reliable build. This work culture enables organizations to serve their customers better with faster delivery of software, solving critical issues quickly and managing unplanned work smoothly.

However, while implementing complete DevOps, companies often encounter various issues. The transition affects processes, organizational culture, structure and even employee habits. Companies struggle to implement DevOps because most of the time their approach is wrong. DevOps implementations have potential obstacles, but they can also be extremely rewarding if implemented properly. In this article, we will share 5 tips for a successful DevOps implementation:

1. Prepare your team

Adopting a new methodology takes time. Before rushing towards it, make sure your entire org has clarity about what DevOps is and its desired outcomes are. The whole team needs to understand that they will soon undergo a vast renovation. For this, you identify proper resources who have the zeal for learning new things and have the ability to think out-of-the-box when configuring complex scenarios.

2. Consider your infrastructure need

Spend some good time to understand your business requirements and then align your goals to design the DevOps infrastructure. Without a clear vision, implementing DevOps will lead to poor
ROI in terms of lost time and productivity. Identify your constraints and bottlenecks to find activities to concentrate on. While understanding infra – consider software cycle time and versioning environments to ensure your build is scalable in the long run.

3. Be clear about your goals

Implementation of DevOps usually has two popular goals – software delivery operation (SDO) and productivity. Prioritize your goals depending on your organizational domain and define your performance metrics at the beginning. Consider what customers care for most and the answer will help you look into things that are worth improving. Analyze performance and get a collective benchmarking report for the latest build by your team to have an insight of its quality and look for ways of further improvement.

4. Invest in tools

For a successful DevOps initiative, be ready to invest in multiple tools to maximize consistency, predictability, and efficiency of your operation. Expand your horizon and explore modern tools that can provide a tremendous boost to the existing process. Select tools that are compatible with the rest of the toolchain you are planning to use. You can seek help from technical experts who will do the research and suggest the proper tools to apply.

5. Automate where possible

Take advantage of modern tools that can execute processes automatically and consistently with minimal human intervention. Automation usually helps things run smoothly with a high rate of success, but it does not come for free. Investing time and effort is a must, to establish an infrastructure that will enable automation to execute smoothly. You don’t need to automate a multitude of processes at once. Automate that one process that is well-known by your team but has been performed manually. Also, learn about the associated toolchain that is required to make it work consistently.