Nine best practices that DevOps must understand

Nine best practices that DevOps must understand
GuideDevelopment and O & M best practices seem to be more important than ever. On the one hand, due to the rapid development of mobile and IOT technologies, enterprise development teams are facing an increasing pressure to deliver more applications at a faster speed.

In December 2015, Gartner predicted that "by the end of 2017, the market demand for mobile application development services will grow at a rate of five times faster than the delivery capability of internal IT departments ."

Due to this mismatch between requirements and capabilities, enterprise organizations are trying to speed up development. One of the increasingly popular methods is development and O & M. According to Gartner, in 2015, enterprise organizations spent $2.3 billion on development and O & M tools. It is estimated that "by 2016, Development and O & M will begin with a niche strategy adopted by large cloud service providers, gradually becoming a mainstream strategy adopted by the top 25% enterprises in the world."

Vendors are particularly optimistic about the scale of the development and O & M market. In the 2016 RightScale report, 80% of large enterprises and 70% of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMB) are using development and O & M.

Unfortunately, although many companies are competing to adopt development O & M, they are not always sure what development O & M needs. Several different companies have proposed the concept of mutual competition, and the IT industry has not yet reached a consensus on an authoritative definition. Gene Kim is one of The most well-known supporters of Development and O & M and is working with The best-selling financial Novel The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win. He admitted: "One of the most criticized aspects of development O & M is that it is difficult to describe what development O & M is ."

Despite the lack of standard definitions, experts have reached consensus on the fundamental principles of development and O & M. Generally, Development and O & M aims to build a culture in which IT development teams and O & M teams work very closely together. Development and O & M are born out of agile development and lean development principles. It requires process automation as much as possible to speed up the deployment of new applications by enterprises. The ultimate goal is not only to improve IT efficiency, but also to make the organization more successful.

Tips from experts

There is a lot of room for change and experimentation with those core principles. Many enterprise organizations are wondering what to do if they want to start using development and O & M practices. To answer this question, we have consulted several development and O & M experts to hear their tips and suggestions on the best practices of development and O & M.

1. Start from the beginning

Experts warned that, in terms of development and O & M, attempts to do too many things at once will inevitably lead to failures. Any large IT department will have existing processes and a deep-rooted culture that cannot change overnight.

They suggested that you should first create a project or team benefiting from the development and O & M practices, and start from scratch. The key is to select such a project: The success rate of development and O & M is high, and it can serve as the foundation for future development and O & M work.

Tim Buntel, vice president of Xebia Labs, said: "You can make changes based on where you get the most benefits. Evaluate what has brought the greatest trouble to your development and deployment processes, and then take this step as a priority ."

David Cramer, vice president of product management at BMC's cloud management and data center Automation business department, agrees. "It is important for the team to build confidence and set an example for others," he said. The success of the initial team directly affects the difficulty of large-scale implementation changes. The project itself is also very important, so it is necessary to select meaningful aspects for the business. If the initial project is not a strategic project, people will despise the results ."

2. Focus on culture, not on tools

The most important thing is that using development and O & M is changing the changes. Committing to automation or purchasing new tools is not enough to bring about the changes most enterprise organizations want to achieve.

Stevan Arychuk, a development and O & M Publicity Officer of the New Relic strategic marketing team, said: "A common trap is to focus on technology rather than cultural elements. Development and O & M focuses on the trust and cooperation between various technologies and operation teams. tools and technologies actually serve to achieve this goal ."

Buntuel said: "Most technical teams believe that tools can solve all problems. Although tools are absolutely important for the development and O & M transformation, they are useless unless supplemented by practical and significant cultural changes. Consider your business goals, trust and communication, and the reasons. Only by figuring out how to start cultural transformation can you invest time and effort in technical solutions ."

3. purchase real-time tools for in-depth understanding of the project

Although technology alone is not enough, tools are definitely part of the answer when talking about how to adopt development and O & M. Experts said IT was vital to encourage communication and cooperation and to have tools that could give everyone real-time visibility into the progress of work on IT projects.

In addition, enterprise organizations need to ensure that all the different team tools they use can be integrated. Enterprise organizations purchase a variety of tools to support development and O & M, which is common. For example, they may include version control management systems, Error Tracking systems, communication platforms, help platforms, and O & M monitoring tools. Buchanen said, "He has seen that the delivery tool chain is not very compatible, resulting in collision among many teams ." Therefore, he suggested that "tool integration is the most helpful technology in supporting development and O & M ."

4. Deployment Automation Technology

Automation is another important part of the development and O & M technology. Buntel said: "Any technology that helps you automate processes in a controlled and scalable way ."

Many vendors currently provide automated tools to simplify the process of configuring, monitoring, and maintaining network infrastructure. These tools can help enterprise organizations deploy applications more quickly and improve IT efficiency.

Likewise, containerized technologies such as Docker are also very helpful. Containers simplify the transition from development servers to production servers and eliminate many difficult problems during deployment.

5. accelerate deployment

According to Puppet Lab's "2015 Development and O & M Market Report", "compared with the IT department with inferior performance, the IT department with outstanding performance has encountered 60 times fewer failures, recovery from faults is 168 times faster. The deployment frequency is also 30 times higher, and the preparation time is shortened by 200 times ."

Similarly, a report by Forrester Research titled "new software priorities: ensuring quality at the same time fast delivery" found that, "development teams that have always delivered in the fastest cycle can achieve the highest satisfaction among business users." It is important that new teams that can deliver new applications as quickly as possible are also building the most quality software.

For most enterprises, accelerating deployment is a key goal of their development and O & M projects. To achieve this goal, they often deploy technologies that are expected to accelerate development. They often implement agile development methods, such as test-driven development, continuous development, continuous integration, Pair programming, and Scrum methods. Experts said that it is important for enterprises to keep this in mind: methods and technologies are not goals themselves; on the contrary, they are only a means to achieve many goals, such as accelerating deployment, improving code quality, and providing better support for business departments.

6. Increase O & M team feedback

Although development and O & M have received much attention, experts have warned that O & M is very important. If communications and cooperation are improved within the Operation Department and between the O & M department and other departments of the IT organization, enterprise organizations are often able to achieve significant efficiency.

"In many cases, agile development has prompted the development team to optimize its delivery pipeline," said Ian Buchanan, a Development Promotion Officer at Atlassian. If you focus on this concept at the beginning: simplifying the feedback from the O & M team, rather than using more delivery automation to achieve local optimization, those teams will be able to achieve greater results ."

7. Develop KPIs for measuring effectiveness

Why are you changing to development O & M? How do you know whether the transformation is successful? Experts said that it would be a good idea to ask these questions before implementing development and O & M. Ideally, Development and O & M should have a positive impact on some key performance indicators (KPIs) that you track for your company.

Stevan Arychuk, the development and O & M propaganda officer of the New Relic strategic marketing team, believes: "You must understand why you implement the development and O & M methods and develop a clear framework to measure the effectiveness. The true value of development and O & M ultimately means that technologies can be used better and have greater flexibility to support businesses, therefore, an effective development and O & M strategy should be able to use KPIs to quantify the positive impact on the business."

8. Change the business process to be consistent with your development pace

After you change the IT process, IT will also affect other aspects of the business. It is recommended that you have a "View" for Cramer ". He explained: "It is important to change the business process to be consistent with the release pace of new versions from development and O & M. For example, the marketing team may have implemented the process to focus on the traditional annual or semi-annual product release cycle. If the release scale is much smaller and the frequency is much higher, they do not know how to change the process. Another example is the internal governance process, which requires an in-depth understanding of the 12-month release plan ."

IT leaders need to ensure that, in addition to the Development and O & M teams, they are still communicating and cooperating with other departments. In fact, many enterprise organizations that have implemented the development and O & M said that the principles behind this concept contribute to many other internal teams, rather than simply to the IT department.

9. Participate in the development and O & M community

As so many enterprises adopt development and O & M, enterprise organizations do not need to "re-invent the wheel ." Experts said that if the company participates in development O & M meetings or online communities and actively communicates with other enterprise organizations that implement similar projects, it would be a great success.

Buchanen pointed out: "to ensure that practical concepts, practices and tools for development and O & M are continuously improved. Your staff need to use the Community to validate ideas, measure progress, and find inspiration for further improvement. Don't be afraid to tell your story, no matter what stage you are on the development and O & M path. There will always be another company that will think your story is helpful to it ."

Best practices for development and O & M: journey, not end point

As enterprise organizations actively implement these development and O & M best practices, they should remember that using development and O & M is a long-term process. Unlike other IT management practices such as ITIL, agile development, and lean manufacturing, Development and O & M is not so much a specific framework or a specific set of practices as a trend and concept.

In most cases, enterprises will not be able to achieve development and O & M. On the contrary, they are constantly trying new tools and new processes, trying to find tools and processes that help them more closely integrate development and O & M, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of business departments.

From: http:// OS .51cto.com/art/201606/513406.htm

Address: http://www.linuxprobe.com/nine-practices-devops.html