THE SECRET OF DEVOPS SUCCESS

WHY ENTERPRISES ARE TURNING TO DEVOPS FOR FASTER DELIVERY OF APPS AND SERVICES

For the uninitiated, DevOps means brining ‘app development’ and ‘IT operations’ together to build and deploy enterprise software quickly and securely. DevOps was once very niche in cloud-native companies such as Facebook and Amazon and now has gone mainstream among enterprises that rely on software to run their businesses.

Gartner defines DevOps as a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through adopting agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps implementations utilise technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.

“Software development and IT operations have never been more connected than today. This level of convergence will only continue increasing in due course and, with demands such as faster product development and enhanced deployment maintenance also sure to increase, there are several

DevOps trends to watch out for in 2022.

In terms of team topologies, there will certainly be a heightened focus on organizational structure and dynamics, rather than technology and practices,” says Ayman El Sheikh, Director, Solutions Architect , MENA, Red Hat He comments DevOps will also be the driving force behind creating the right balance between stream-based and platform-based team organisation, enabling broader service resilience and reliability to enable DevOps at scale, and unlocking full cloud potential concerning elastic infrastructure, cloud service catalogue, self-services, automation, and workload migration.

“Furthermore, we will likely see hybrid becoming the deployment norm and the emergence of cultural blockers focusing on cultural, organisational, and process changes,” he says.

Feras Juma, IoT and Integration Solutions Manager, Software AG, says the concept of DevOps is key when entities have numerous release and operation tasks involved. In addition, extensive automation is key when it comes to DevOps; the automation of the overall delivery and all the associated repetitive tasks.

“The more entities automate, the more agile, efficient, and quicker the production cycles are and the more efficient DevOps will be. Generally, entities with highly developed DevOps would mean that most of the repetitive tasks have been automated. Therefore, as entities look to evolve and transform, the dire need for DevOps will only continue to grow,” he says.

However, according to Mark Ackerman, area VP, Middle East & Africa, ServiceNow, the centre of gravity for DevOps will start moving from automation to insights. While there will be some tool consolidation, overall tool sprawl in DevOps will continue to increase, especially with individual product teams optimising for their own unique needs. This will exacerbate the need for a management layer to generate insights across various tools and teams. Engineering and product leaders will need such management platforms to understand the ROI of their investments, delivery bottlenecks, identify highperforming teams, and more.

He adds there is an increasing focus on ensuring DevOps teams identify and deliver business value. Managing across DevOps teams, paired with an increased focus on AI/ML-based optimisation, will drive value stream management practices and the increased adoption of

Feras Juma Mark Ackerman

solutions that connect all the elements of the value stream (not just software delivery) – including the demonstration of business impact.

The role of cloud in DevOps

Cloud computing makes the implementation of DevOps simpler by bringing accessibility and collaborative workflow tools to empower DevOps engineers.

“As a result, applications can be developed, tested, and deployed in various environments, with cloud essentially serving as the platform where IT-based organizations can migrate from mid-DevOps to High-DevOps. Once such a migration has been completed, these same organization will become accustomed to several valuable capabilities, including on-demand deployment rather than daily or weekly frequency, lead time to change (LTTC) of less than an hour, and lead time to recover (LTTR) also less than 60 minutes. At the same time, organizations will also be able to overcome the burden of legacy and maximise team collaboration efforts,” says El Sheikh from Red Hat. Ackerman from ServiceNow opines that DevOps interest is largely being driven by the desire of large organisations with legacy architectures to move to the cloud. Cloud adoption is seen as the right way to take advantage of new technologies and to increase the pace of innovation. “Wholesale ‘lift-and-shift’ approaches have been shown to provide minimal (if any) value, and so approaches that focus more on migrating services and redefining them to leverage cloud advantages have become popular. This hinges on agile development practices and DevOps approaches to continuous delivery and continuous improvement.” He advocates the same organisations must eliminate silos between engineering and operations teams, that have caused friction in the past so that the rate of change can accelerate to meet the needs of the business. Overall, this means that many businesses are acting in a hybrid mode where some services are in-house and others are in the cloud with more that spread across both.

Getting into DevOps

Though bringing development and operations is a compelling value proposition for CIOs, many enterprises still face a myriad of roadblocks while implementing and scaling DevOps practices. On top of the list is a lack of required skills.

“The role of DevOps means a collaboration between development and operation teams to be able to manage the overall delivery. Collaboration is core when it comes to DevOps. What entities must do is to understand the skill sets that are required between operations and development to build the most suitable DevOps team; understanding setting guidelines and the practice itself,” says Juma from Software AG.

ServiceNow’s Ackerman says DevOps tools and techniques have advanced considerably over the last ten years so the remaining pitfalls tend to be around people, process and the challenges of implementing DevOps at scale for larger organisations. “DevOps is not something that just gets ‘switched on’. It requires adjustments in skills, and team dynamics. Traditional operational roles must change to either become embedded within the development path or provide a centralised policy role while automation handles what was previously their transactional work,” he says.

Red Hat’s El Sheikh concludes: “As with any form of technology-based transformation, opportunities in waiting are accompanied by factors to be mindful of and avoid. In terms of DevOps initiatives, some of more common pitfalls this applies to include white labeling legacy teams, lacking the buy-in of all enterprise IT teams, and focusing solely on DevOpsifying cloud-native workloads and thus leaving monolithic workloads behind. Moreover, other pitfalls to avoid include insisting on a DevOps unified stack from a sole vendor and boasting insufficient dashboarding and reporting capabilities.”

Ayman El Sheikh