If your company is gearing up to get hands-on experience with tools like Terraform, Chef, Kubernetes, and Prometheus, you might want to consider developing a transformation strategy for your teams and managers so they can make the transition into DevOps as swiftly as possible. You’ll find many consultants who have done this for huge IT companies to guide you through the process, but what you need to ask yourself is, “Is it enough?”
DevOps Transformation Strategy
With the ever-increasing demand for DevOps, it is natural that there would be many different strategies to accelerate the DevOps transformation. In my opinion, a DevOps transformation strategy should include
1. Process
2. People
3. Tools
Common Mistake
Most of the organizations make a common mistake of looking at each process, people, and tools all in silos and isolation. It should be looked at as a vertically integrated strategy.
Where organizations fail, is completely overlooking at the “People” side to make the transformation happen which is tied to certification training and team culture. You have to assess your people’s skill set and see if there are gaps in the areas and empower them with the right DevOps and IT certification training.
Without mobilizing your teams with the right DevOps training, you are most likely to struggle in making the DevOps transformation and subsequently will be unable to achieve your business goals such as standardizing the process, accelerating release timings, eliminating errors, and creating efficiencies within your team.
You will also have to consider the cultural change your teams will have to undergo in order to achieve DevOps transformation. This cultural shift is what drives the process of transition and to ensure it happens swiftly, you’ll have to make sure your teams are trained for it.
Areas of DevOps training include Agile, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Chef Terraform and Prometheus. Go for the certification route and employ regular training that coaches your engineers and developers with accurate, up-to-date information about the production environment so they can plan deployment appropriately.
Top DevOps Certifciation
These DevOps Certifications include:
- DevOps Foundation Certification
- The SRE Foundation course
- DevOps Leader course
- DevSecOps Engineering Certification
- Course on Continuous Delivery Architecture for DevOps
- DevOps Test Engineering Certification
- Certified Agile Service Manager Certification
- Certified Agile Process Owner Certification
Top DevOps Tools
While your company’s DevOps transformation success depends entirely on the fact how well your process allows the cultural shift, tools are still extremely important in facilitating this step. With the necessary training and certifications, your team will also need to get hands-on experience with some of the tools that are typically used in a DevOps environment. These tools include:
- Test automation: Water, Selenium
- Source code repository: Git, TFS, Subversion, Cloud Force,
- Virtual infrastructure: Microsoft Azure, VMware vCloud, Amazon Web Services,
- Build server: SonarQube, Artifactory, Jenkins,
- Configuration management: Ansible, Puppet, Salt, Chef
Transforming Traditional Software Development and Operations to DevOps
Moving from a setting where you employ traditional software development operations to a DevOps environment can be a challenging task as it involves a significant change across the organization. The only thing to keep in mind is whether you’re assigning the right training to the right people.
If you’re on the right path you’ll know as creating a delivery pipeline with continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, continuous testing, a switch to DevOps will have numerous benefits for your organization in the long-run. But if you’re not setting your goals right, you will find it difficult to not only transition your organization into DevOps, but also sustain your operations. In order to keep a close eye on how the transition pans out, you must develop a mechanism for monitoring the development of your teams through these training and newly set-up processes.
Here is what you need to consider:
Development cycles:
In order to have a clear understanding of how your automated deployment pipeline is performing, you must keep a close eye on how frequently the code is being revised along with continuously keeping track of how many features that serve your objectives are being incorporated and achieved. Similarly, you must also develop an understanding of how many issues are being identified and fixed.
Deployments:
Have specific tools in place to notify the right teams and stakeholders when an automated deployment fails. Most tools come with an alert system that allows you to notify and engage relevant people automatically via chat servers in the organization when deployment or build fails.
Application performance:
You must be hands-on in handling issues that arise regarding application performance and regression of applications. Employ APM tools like AppDynamics and New Relic that gives you insights into the performance and of your applications.
Server health:
Monitoring server health is key to any type of infrastructure. Set up the right tools to do this for you where it is automated and generates regular and timely reports on the health of your servers.
User activity:
It is equally important to know where the issues are coming from as it is to know as they arise. By monitoring user activity, you can ensure that you receive insights into resource usage and user behavior patterns which can help you scale up your infrastructure while introducing new features.
Vulnerabilities:
Make sure that there is a system in place to address all known and unknown vulnerabilities. Your known vulnerabilities are those that are listed in the National Vulnerability Database and your unknown vulnerabilities are those that arise due to insecure practices. So as code moves into production, you should have a system to identify and mitigate them.
Don't do:
Don’t make the two common mistakes every organization makes;
1. Not looking at Process, People and Tools, all as an integrated DevOps transformation strategy.
2. Overlooking the “People” side of the strategy. It is critical to understand that continuous DevOps training for your workforce, based on your process performance metrics data will help standardize the process and accelerate DevOps adoption and transformation.
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