How Do You Ensure a Successful DevOps Implementation?

Have you ever thought of a DevOps implementation strategy for your business? Do you anticipate hurdles? DevOps is a disruptive technology that has a sweeping impact on how businesses execute and handle software development projects. In terms of software development, it can be one of the most complicated and complex technologies. There are a few phases that comprise DevOps: continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing and continuous deployment. Each step and phase is critical and organizations implementing DevOps cannot be successful without implementing all phases. Without the right expertise, many companies find it difficult to execute these phases correctly. Specifically, continuous integration and continuous delivery may be the most difficult elements to master.

What is continuous integration, delivery and deployment?

Continuous integration (CI) is a process that involves validating the code changes from developers and testers into a single software project. The traditional approach involves developers working on code and integrating it once for testing. This approach is far from perfect, because a small bug in the code that is weeks old could force a development team to revise code written previously. To mitigate this problem, CI requires organizations to invest in automation to integrate and test code continuously. Continuous delivery (CD) is a process that involves teams developing, building, testing, and releasing software in short cycles. Continuous deployment (CD) is a process that involves releasing or deploying software automatically into the production environment.

Should we automate every process?

When most companies implement their DevOps strategy, they create and refine products at a faster pace than they can with traditional software development approaches. As with any technology adoption, a DevOps implementation requires organizations to automate efficient operations. In spite of this, companies may not need to automate every process. When organizations evaluate process automation, they need to determine if a particular process needs to be automated. The following questions need to be considered and answered when evaluating whether or not to automate:

What are common business scenarios?
How often are the associated processes or scenarios repeated?
How long does a given process take from start to finish?
How many people and resources will be involved in the process? Do they cause any delays in CI/CD?
If not automated, will a process lead to lot of errors?
How urgently do these processes need to be automated?

It is important to categorize tasks.

Upon answering the questions listed above, organizations can categorize the steps in a CI/CD implementation into urgent and non-urgent tasks. Next, rank these tasks based on the value and priority they lend to the process. By identifying priority areas, it will be clear who and the number of people impacted by all of these tasks. To have a DevOps implementation reach its full potential, companies must take the time to plan and evaluate all of these steps.

It’s best to enlist the help of an expert.

Investing in DevOps and adding automation tools for a software development project is the easy part. Creating a fully-functional and customized solution for your business is where it gets tricky, especially if you don’t have a plan or the expertise to execute that plan. This means that DevOps implementation has a much lower success rate without an experienced partner.

With over 20+ years of experience, Prime Technology Group is an ideal DevOps partner who assist with every step of your implementation. Specifically, Prime will:

Identify your organizations’ readiness for adoption of DevOps and Cloud technologies
Define the road-map for adoption of DevOps
Identify benefits, risks, and cost impact

The core of Prime’s DevOps offerings is our highly differentiated technical expertise in DevOps Solutions and Services including: