everythingdevops-blog

[everythingdevops-blog]

Adopting DevOps should be a Top Business Priority for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

The value in adopting DevOps in your organization 

The DevOps approach has several clear-cut benefits with the value centered in several key business areas: improved market agility, increased quality and revised culture of cooperation and effectiveness in staff operations. By promoting and implementing a DevOps culture your SME’s business, Dev and Ops teams align much closer together and can better share in-between knowledge. This lets you create products more fluidly, and increase the deployment rates. The time for evaluating the business idea, development, testing and moving the finished product into the operations department reduces dramatically. Quality margins improve, and this feeds back into the ability of your teams to continually fine-tune the products you offer.

Businesses see a point in adopting DevOps only if it is directly contributing to the company’s increased effectiveness, productivity and, of course, profitability. The only way that it is possible for small and medium enterprises is when their IT and DevOps teams are working in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs. And only a successful and timely DevOps adoption inside your organization will help you in beating competitors and staying afloat as the development across the industry speeds up.

In the last years, we’ve seen a tremendous application delivery shift in businesses. We moved away from the old ways of having large-scale system implementations based on one single project and its continued maintenance. SMEs now turn to perceiving application delivery as a continuous evolution. This is very DevOps plays a leading role as this software engineering trend ensures that such a major shift is possible. It brings all of the different parts of the enterprise together: business, development and operation teams collaborate on a different more in-depth level with a goal at automating processes. This helps eliminate the usual constraints and take the time-to-market issues off the table.

Squadex clients benefit from a faster delivery and better business agility by getting the know-how from our DevOps professionals:

In the latest ECS-Digital research on adopting DevOps in businesses, 57% of SMEs have partially implemented DevOps practices in their daily routine. The key benefit of DevOps for them is improved inter-departmental collaboration. But the other 43% who haven’t yet adopted DevOps, the collaboration issues is among the last priorities on the list.

Step-by-step guide to a high-level DevOps lifecycle

According to IBM Cloud Director, the end goal of a relevant DevOps practice is to cut the development time and improve enterprise’s efficiency. A growing business has to start from the “Business Needs” of the company and go down the road to make it come to life. The goal of adopting DevOps in your company is to push your business needs into production at a quicker pace more reliably. The goal of in any DevOps practice is to cut the time and better the efficiency of processes. You need to move from the “Business Need” the “It’s Live!” stage.

Business needs are a DevOps priority

But does your business have to get involved? Of course, your SME leadership focuses on the “business needs” of your company. But when we look at organizations that have implemented proper DevOps practices, the internal structure of the company shifts to focus on delivering great business results across the whole lifecycle of your product/services offering.

DevOps also ensures that employees have the ability to correct their work direction during the whole lifetime of a project. Things and goals tend to change, competitors may roll out some features that may make some of your project’s parts trivial, and all of this makes the need to adjust your plan and make it different when you actually deliver. This is easily done when your business need is close to both the Development and Operations teams that are able to steer and drive this alignment of goals. Have a look at the infographic below that clearly shows how a DevOps delivery cycle looks like:

The clash inside organizations

Measuring the impact of DevOps on the things that matter to business is vital. Currently, the majority of SMEs are still meddling with DevOps, and some parts of companies clash inside of organizations and try to prevent the full adoption. The culture within enterprises is shifting too drastically and dramatically, although the effects are mostly positive, thanks to DevOps culture adoption.

Such a shift in companies is making an impact on all operations with software development being the key part. SMEs have it easier to change and adapt compared to larger businesses, and this lets them move the workplace culture a step ahead of their larger counterparts.

If we look at business, operation and developer teams from a historical point of view, it was not their aim to establish inter-connection between them. They started cooperating only when it was absolutely necessary to get the other team’s input. SMEs are still faced with such a separation as most responsibilities are set in stone for each team and the individual employee. All business units are used to working in their closed-in niche, and there is a lack of will to leave the comfort zone and act outside the pre-defined roles. Such actions in the past could have been viewed negatively.

While most businesses that want to implement DevOps have employees that want the business to prosper, but making people act outside their duties is perceived with dyssynchrony. But to reach the end goals of any business, namely, ensuring fast and quality product delivery, and solving issues on the go requires people to interconnect their duties and reach outside their business unit. With proper DevOps application, such collaboration can be smooth and result in the improvement of cross-functions. As a result, we’ll see your inner business units become conjoined so that you can forget about business stagnation and reap the benefits.

If we look at business, operation and developer teams from a historical point of view, it was not their aim to establish inter-connection between them. They started cooperating only when it was absolutely necessary to get the other team’s input. SMEs are still faced with such a separation as most responsibilities are set in stone for each team and the individual employee. All business units are used to working in their closed-in niche, and there is a lack of will to leave the comfort zone and act outside the pre-defined roles. Such actions in the past could have been viewed negatively.

While most businesses that want to implement DevOps have employees that want the business to prosper, but making people act outside their duties is perceived with dyssynchrony. But to reach the end goals of any business, namely, ensuring fast and quality product delivery, and solving issues on the go requires people to interconnect their duties and reach outside their business unit. With proper DevOps application, such collaboration can be smooth and result in the improvement of cross-functions. As a result, we’ll see your inner business units become conjoined so that you can forget about business stagnation and reap the benefits.

DevOps represents change in internal business structures

Many SMEs are faced with internal structural issues that limit the company’s prospects: engineers are not willing to be on-call, the Ops team have a negative attitude towards those who write code, and even executives that are slow to embrace automation. Organizations must overcome the culture war to be able to approach the agility and productivity that organizations following a DevOps model gain. The faster they can get there the faster these organizations can take the competitive edge away from traditional enterprises. 

DevOps culture looks very different from organization to organization. However, regardless of the business implementing a DevOps approach, the potential benefits are the same. From faster deployments, increased efficiency and cultural changes towards experimentation and away from rigid planning, a DevOps culture has the ability to transform an organisation completely. Wholeheartedly adopting a DevOps culture has real implications on how a business is positioned to take on the market. With many industries facing uncertainty and a host of upstarts disrupting the status quo, starting the change towards a DevOps culture can be an important weapon in repositioning your business.

Empathy is the core of DevOps adoption

One of the foundational ideas behind DevOps is mutual empathy. Having empathy from operations toward developers and vice versa, as well as empathy in other business-related and non-technical company units remains vital. It’s not about patting your colleague on a shoulder. We are talking about the moral mandate of a developer that not simply creates his/her part of the software that works and not care about how it can be deployed in production. The goal is to push employees to think outside of their small task, and to take into account how hard or easy it would be to use their work by others in the company: is the developed app secure; how hard is it to deploy it; is it easy to keep it running, and other questions. If those things are not accounted for the developer’s colleagues on the Ops side will pay the price if something goes wrong past the release.

By ensuring that the SME has empathy for each other at its core, businesses will deliver better products/services. And doing just that is the destination that DevOps aims to bring companies at. Until this idea is ingrained, DevOps will face a cultural war of sorts.

Summary. Your people as your most valuable DevOps resource

By considering to adopt the DevOps approach to running your SME, you help yourself to rethink the ways your organization operates: how it deploys its teams across the enterprise, and how often do you address structural problems that appear within your business over time. Now you can lay out a new foundation for your SME based on the culture of cooperation and experimentation. With proper guidance in the application of DevOps culture, you are getting the key tool for addressing the waste of time, human resources, and money in your business.

Becoming a DevOps organization is no easy task and taking up on such a challenge requires faith that changing the existing processes will bring its benefits. Reworking and optimizing organisations are the new norm, regardless of their size, industry, and goals. The faith in DevOps culture is driven by the firm and quantifiable statistics, but the intangible benefits to corporate culture are just as compelling to attain. Many businesses are looking at implementing DevOps, and even more, SMEs are in the active process of its application. When your company is delivering quality ahead of time, there is a strong chance your competitors will be left behind as you are getting the bigger piece of the pie.

Key Takeaways

In order to stay current, businesses need to constantly adapt to an ever-changing environment, respond to competitors and stay on top of the innovation cycle, increasing customer value via responsiveness to change.

Increased service quality depends on both the availability of the service and being able to restore the service to an error-free state. Thanks to fast feedback loops and high release velocity, service breakdowns can be removed much more quickly than in the past.

DevOps are built on a sound principle of waste reduction such wait times and process overhead due to continuous improvement. This helps to improve agility and has a positive impact on costs.

Fostering continuous learning and improving culture through efficient principles is what DevOps is all about. In a fast-paced unpredictable environment, non-stop improvement is paramount for sustaining your competitive advantage. It is also important for attracting exceptional talent and keeping employee satisfaction at a high level.

[everythingdevops-blog]

For System Administrators, Making the Leap to DevOps is a Matter of Life and Death

DevOps is all about agility, automation and the free flow of information. When implementing DevOps, servers are often handled as interchangeable parts, which is why system administrators, who made their careers configuring and troubleshooting individual servers, have a significant role to play in the brave new world that is DevOps. However, they must find a way to apply their skills to the entire IT infrastructure that is described and managed by code i.e. managing cloud services, using automated deployment tools and code repositories.

Mass Debugging

The debugging skills that a system administrator possesses are still very much relevant in DevOps, however what changes is the scale and complexity. Also, they need to be able to take a properly tuned server and transform it into code, which something they can already do, but they would need to take this one step further and lay down those changes in a consistent and repeatable way for future deployments.

In addition to the above mentioned skills, system administrators must learn to focus on the infrastructure they can control, usually from the operating system and up, because in the cloud they most likely will not have access to, or information about any underlying hardware, networks or storage.

For example, at the operating system level, you can see whether or not you have an inefficient process that is eating up too much system memory. But, you are not able to do some of the fine tuning that you are used to doing in a Linux container in a private cloud.

SysAdmin’s Tribal Knowledge

In DevOps, if you see that your system is failing or is experiencing performance problems, it is often removed and replaced with a healthy one, instead of going through all of the hassles of debugging it. If that same system image runs perfectly when redeployed, the issue may have been with the cloud hardware or a corrupt system image. However, if the same problem persists, the server is then brought back up and the root cause analysis process is initiated.

An area where system administrators will not see a whole lot of changes is supporting legacy applications that are either too expensive or too difficult to move to the cloud. This means that they still require individual configuration and troubleshooting. Also, we must keep in mind that these legacy systems will require hands-on experience in the future, thus generating demand for veteran system administrators. This tribal knowledge around legacy systems is very difficult to replace.

In addition to this in-depth knowledge, the services of system administrators will be required when new servers need configuration, new tasks to be automated, and unexpected problems resolved.

New Technical Skills SysAdmins Will Need

In order to use their configuration, debugging and monitoring skills in DevOps, system administrators will need to supplement the skills they already have and learn new tools such as:

Languages - Most system administrators already use shell scripts to automate redundant or error-prone tasks, which is a key aspect of DevOps. But learning a new programming language such as Python or Perl can help them create more robust scripts more quickly.

Cloud Services - Because most DevOps systems run in the cloud, being able to transition from managing interfaces to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure is a valuable skill. Anyone with basic shell scripting skills can easily pick them up.

Configurations Management - Knowing configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef will assist system administrators in automating the massive quantities of system provisioning that is vital to DevOps. By understanding the languages on which these tools are built, such as Ruby, can make it easier to extend their use to fit an organization's particular need.

Miscellaneous Tools - Inventory management tools such as PuppetDB will help system administrators identify the tools they need to manage in a fast-paced cloud environment. For performance monitoring, Prometheus and Amazon CloudWatch are excellent tools. Combined with a cloud service, it is possible to create systems of metrics to understand how your infrastructure is performing.

The next step would be to combine build management tools like Gradle and Maven, with continuous integration platforms like Jenkins. This enables system administrators to provide the agility promised by DevOps.

Along with the list of technology and product skills, system administrators need to evolve from being experts on one vendor’s product to working as generalists and collaborating with others to resolve problems. In DevOps, system administrators must share their knowledge instead of hoarding it as a means of preserving their jobs. For example, software engineers would write the Chef configuration and policy cookbooks while the infrastructure engineers assist software engineers instrument code for better monitoring and health checks.

The days of developers creating applications without much knowledge regarding the infrastructure on which they will be running are long gone. Nowadays, the value of the system administrator is not what they can do, but rather how they can help others and how can they help align this with the company’s goals and objectives.

For this reason, system administrators that are capable of taking the leap to DevOps, will not become obsolete. It can provide them with super powers that can make their skills even more valuable to a business.