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DevOps is an emerging practice to minimize the latency and shorten the development and deployment cycle. The staples are the technical advancements and quick resolution requests from the user community. Concisely, Organizations demand for operational agility to be quick for responsiveness and so to gain competitive advantages. The traditional setups are required to be replaced via bringing out advancements being derived by IT innovators. Cloud operations, Virtualization and Software defined networking is some of them which would be pressing in upcoming years for organizations.

Many organizations have possibly adopted DevOps model already but theyre yet facing challenges in availing apt partnership between Development and Operation teams. The questions below are required to be answered to establish a sustainable DevOps model.

• How to bring a change over a legacy setup without destroying the tranquility of production? (Process/System orient)
• When to introduce a change to acquire it as a part of the overall system? (People/Coordination orient)
• What tooling is to be used to carry out a new advancement? (Technology/Governance orient)

Its inevitable that every stakeholder must participate in the process where required, even so the foundation starts from the top management. The strategy makers must form a pathway for every member rather than sinking it to Developers and Operations folks to look out which often leads them to a dilemma situation and strain.

Lets discuss the questions above individually to engross the DevOps concept.

How to bring a change over a legacy setup?

The challenge is to ensure that there is one criterion system defined to leap a new technology into the existing system without hindering the current production progress. This remains very important from the managements perspective since the upgrading/advancement shouldn’t happen by staking current revenues.

Unfortunately this hasnt been a focus area for most of the players and they rely upon passing the ball method. The development team delivers the solution to operation for deployment in an entirely new environment. They engage in doing it by using their own scripts and given codes which apparently were framed in a different environment. This leads to duplication/repetition, artifact errors, bugs and other deployment obstruction. The development team is then asked back to do trouble shoots and diagnosing. This cumbersome process not only gets the impediments but also embarrasses the current production.

A system needs to be identified as a resolution which shall suggest the integration between Development and Operation folks. Even if they are located in diverse locations, its needed that they start communicating right from the planning phase. Operations must have a say in terms of design, infrastructure requirement and code definitions. Successful deployment utterly depends on a frequent communication, identical technology and framework used to build a new solution. A shared result areas and incentives are advised to make for the optimum outcomes.

When to introduce a change?

Allocation of roles and responsibilities amongst members with scheduling is ineludible to practice set process at its best. Every team member is required to be known with each other and should be aware of the allocation of work by a defined time and place so as to maintain the expected communication formats. Operations and Development teams are viewed to know as which person is responsible for which application to develop/deploy and if all steps are being taken in a sync right from the planning stage.

The process demands for avoiding every friction between Development and Operation teams in terms of work allocations and distinguish protocols. A development team continuously looks for new arrivals and to bring changes for the betterments whereas an Operations team wishes to maintain the stability for uninterrupted production. Resulting derivations are to be controlled.

A change is deemed to make for Agility and veracious Alignment and thats where its needed that both of the departments are following the defined procedures and involving in communication with cross functional folks.

DevOps collects people to work together, share understanding of technology, common goals and ways to achieve them. A point would be worth noticing here that there are automation and integrative tools in the market which suggest systemizing the communication patterns. However, it is primarily relates with people including top management who should play their part of continuous monitoring.

What tooling is to be used?

As mentioned above that there are solutions available in the market, pitching for optimization of organizations DevOps but as a matter of fact they should be called supportive technologies to automate the system. It varies organization wise that which solution is apt to be introduced and in what stage. For example, a collaboration tool can be introduced to optimize the communication amongst the team members.

DevOps indeed demands for automation and can be catered by choosing the solutions smartly. An environmental tool can be used by the management to check the status of various developments in progress. Similarly an automated dashboard can work as MIS for the members.  The idea is not to spend money on high technologies but to direct the processes for a faster and error free deployment. It must be done to bridge the gaps of technical and cultural differences amongst the team members working in different geographies. DevOps is chiefly a managements lookout and its unlikely that a technology comes with a quick fix resolution. That said we cant disregard that proper solutions must be implemented to bring in the required coordination and build up the overall model.

DevOps is a new concept with many challenges. Ensuring cohesiveness and mitigating every gap between Development and Operation to derive better outputs is the ultimate goal of this approach. Its importance cant be neglected since it not only saves the efforts but also secures the current system for a static production. Enterprises must think of it as an exhaustive activity involving every stakeholder of a change management.

Related Reports:

Platform as a Service (PaaS) Market – Global Advancements, Business Models, Technology Roadmap, Worldwide Market Forecasts & Analysis (2013 – 2018)

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