Formulating an Effective DevOps Plan through Azure Training

DevOps is the norm for any enterprise seeking to excel in the competitive industry of today and streamline both their internal as well as external process. Aligning enterprise ideology with the DevOps concepts is a standard practice also for organizations who have hitherto functioned without the inherent collaboration and cooperation that exists within a DevOps framework.

The popularity of DevOps is taking over the enterprise landscape, and it is easy to say that a considerable number of Enterprises worldwide are looking to established themselves according to Agile principles. In fact according to one report by Forbes, 50 percent of enterprises worldwide have implemented DevOps into the organizational structure, and more are looking to do so this year. This is mostly due to the overwhelming desire by the majority of organizations to speed along the development and delivery process, ultimately making them continuous, while also increasing the amount of collaboration that exists within an organization.

 Now, for an enterprise that is specifically looking at cloud computing in the future or has already moved a number of critical processes on to the cloud, are in a perfect position to instill DevOps practices. Additionally, those who are adopting Azure as their cloud platform of choice, have the perfect platform from which to launch the DevOps ideology in their organization. Microsoft Azure, both in terms of features that come with the platform, as well as the intrinsic alignment with DevOps ideals that the cloud service provider conforms to, is a superior platform to launch DevOps from.

To that end, in this article, we will be looking at the vital elements of an effective DevOps strategic plan, as well as how training teams on Microsoft Azure can help both achieve said plan in the near future, and how the platform itself can be a point of assistance for the managers looking to implement DevOps and the teams looking to adopt the principles.   

A Change in Organizational Mindset

The first and foremost aspect of a good DevOps strategy is the adoption of a mindset that may be radically different from what the organizations may be used to in the past but have to be adopted in order to bring about the change that managers want to see in the ranks. DevOps is a set of principles that places Agile principles and Agile delivery at the core of its ideology and has the Agile methodology as the modus operandi. All of this requires a change in the mindset of the individuals looking to bring about this change, and those on whim this change will be implemented.

This makes up two groups of people; the managers and the teams, both of whom have to change their usual way of doings things to align themselves with the newer, better concepts. And the same works for organizations who are adopting Azure.

Microsoft Azure has a set of features that may be alien to those who have never used cloud services before, or those who have been using another cloud service provider such as AWS. However, a lot, if not all of the features that come with the Azure platform are meant to ease the experience of the teams using them, on the enterprise front. In this way, delivering training on Azure technologies will help the enterprise adopt DevOps quicker, and will also help the decision-makers within the enterprise to develop an effective DevOps strategy.

Processes, People and Technologies

DevOps are a set of principles that are built on three basic pillars; which are the processes, the people in charge of the processes, and the technologies that aid in the completion of the processes. Adopting a process that enables the teams to develop and deploy faster is ideal in terms of DevOps. For this, the people have to come together and decide what will the best way to go forward while maintaining maximum functionality. This means the aforementioned change in the mindset has to occur, which will make the adoption of the technologies easier and faster.

And finally, we come to the technology, which includes Azure. Adopting Azure is not the issue here; the problem arises when the teams have to operate according to a different mindset, on a system that they may have never used before or never explored the full potential of. This can be a problem if all the services or products that the enterprise will be coming out with are to be developed with Azure as the foundation.

Azure DevOps Solutions

A bit of good news for organizations is that they have Azure’s own set of DevOps solutions which they can leverage into delivering their services and applications much faster and with much greater reliability. These features are a part of the Azure enterprise solutions package, and with the right MS Azure training, make it very easy for enterprises to develop effective DevOps strategies.