Things to Consider before Going for DevOps Consulting Services for Development

Posted by Peter Gills on June 1st, 2016

“Is DevOps going to work for me?” asked the CTO of a renowned media and entertainment company who needed a secure, and scalable infrastructure on AWS. This also remains the million dollar question for many organizations who want to embrace DevOps in their organizational culture. If Google is believed then DevOps is the most searched thing. Ironically, there are also many misconceptions associated with this term. And the success about this practice of operation and development heavily depends upon the fact that how sagaciously a team differentiates between development and practice.

During software development life cycle, the development team deals with deadlines for developing applications. In the process, they expect the operations team also to be equally innovative and agile. Simultaneously, the operations team view the development team as a team with no idea about production environment. So there is lack of trust between development team which pushes the releases and operations team which doesn’t believe in the releases.

DevOps practice ensures to bring the development and operations team on the same platfom to ensure frequent, stable, reliable and high quality application/software deliveries. It create a platform where every project member works towards a common goal. The DevOps philosophy is based on four pillars: Consistency, Agility, Quality and Scalability.

Different kind of tools or approaches that comes as a part and parcel of DevOps services

Automation works on the principle that any repetitive operation should be automated. This certainly applies to all the DevOps activities as well; coding, recoding, testing, installation or administration. After automation of the operations, a team can optimize its efficiency by 80 to 90%.

Continuous Integration, Delivery & Deployment is a process to improvise code quality, testing, generating automated reports. This ensures enhanced code coverage and efficiency in transitioning codes to production environment.
Version Control as a DevOps practice has become the integral part of coding and development. This involves monitoring code changes, performing due diligence, restoring older versions, distributing codes between teams and archiving codes centrally.

Logging, Monitoring and Reporting provides solution to many problems. It allows a user to see the impact of code runs on system, infrastructure and network.

Configuration Management practice eases the deployment of all the servers and applications. It involves configuring and fine tuning the systems (with a single click) and setting up LMR for every possible component.

Cloudification is a very new thing. If any device or application is moved to some invisible place that leads to downtime. For this, the user doesn’t need to buy a device and spend additional consultation and configuration cost. The user can click on a service and start using it.

Learn and Experiment involves best possible tools, practices or processes that help an organization in learning from the past failures. This provides safeguard from identified and unidentified risks.

Buy-in Strategy: Management buy-in is retrospectively as important as Employee buy-in. It personifies the dedication of staff towards the common vision and goals of the company. DevOps allows in developing a comprehensive buy-in strategy.

What prevents DevOps from thriving?

There is no doubt that the work-think-act philosophy of DevOps turbo charges the development operations. But there are some basic obstacles which prevent DevOps from thriving:

Lack of experimentation

Many organizations hesitate to experiment and purely rely upon the consultant’s advice for preparing strategies. The better idea is to experiment before taking the advice of DevOps consultant. The outcomes of the experimentation give better decision making ability and confidence.

Conventional systems

Many organizations use legacy systems with basic and essential functions. The primary reason for the hesitancy is the fear of increased cost and risk involved in replacing the conventional systems. The key to success resides in replacing the conventional systems with upgraded systems that support DevOps consulting services.

Lack of buy-in

The DevOps transformation presupposes buy-in at the leadership level. If the organization lacks this buy-in, then it won’t be able to make maximum out of DevOps. The management should be willing to implement these changes.

Conservative Habits

Organizations are like a sack of corn; independent yet detached. The organizations should work as a unit besides being defragmented in silos. Different units of the organization should collaborate effectively for sharing the information, tasks, priorities, tools, etc.

The need of the hour is to understand DevOps consulting service as a methodology for brainstorming and effective planning besides a team restructuring process. Before implementing DevOps the organizations must have a willingness for change to get durable, resilient, flexible service or product.