DevOps combines a strategic set of practices, tools, and philosophies to maximize your organization’s ability to deliver high-velocity applications in shorter cycles with better quality. This quick guide outlines the Moonswitch approach to DevOps as a service with six steps for successful implementation.
A Quick Primer on DevOps
DevOps combines the words “development” and “operations” to describe a strategy that streamlines processes between software development and IT operations teams to improve the software development lifecycle.
DevOps is Critical to Modern Software Development
Traditional software development models often resulted in silos between development and operations teams, resulting in inefficiencies that included:
- Software update delays
- Poor collaboration across the production environment
- Increased human errors
- Delayed IT infrastructure implementation
- Lack of automation
- Slow bug fixing
- Inefficient unit testing environment
- Delayed software time to market
- Poor software quality
- Decreased customer satisfaction
An effective DevOps plan addresses these challenges by optimizing the entire application lifecycle. With the right strategy in place, DevOps practices remove silos between teams to streamline operations from development to deployment.
Key Capabilities of a Successful DevOps Strategy
Continuity is at the core of an effective DevOps implementation plan, making “continuous everything” a mantra central to the DevOps philosophy.
As a result, the following fundamental capabilities of DevOps emphasize continuity at every stage of the software development lifecycle:
Continuous Planning
Continuous Planning is ongoing throughout the entire DevOps cycle based on feedback from developers and users. As the process moves from one stage to the next, feedback is aggregated and used by planners and architects to optimize the next cycle.
Continuous Integration
Software is continuously changing to accommodate new features and improvements. Continuous Integration (CI)is a set of practices that automates code changes from multiple contributors into a central repository to run builds and tests.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery (CD) automates continuous testing, configuration, and deployment from a build to the production environment.
Continuous Operations
Continuous Operations leverage infrastructure automation tools to continuously update applications while avoiding downtime that may affect the user experience.
Continuous Quality
Continuous Quality is a core value embedded into DevOps culture that inspires DevOps teams to create superior user experiences by:
- Continuously integrating features that meet market demands
- Providing features that add more value than technical debt
Continuous Security
Continuous Security fuses safety protocols into software infrastructure and delivery. Commonly referred to as DevSecOps, this set of practices introduces protocols early in the lifecycle to ensure security at every layer of the development process.
Continuous Collaboration
Continuous Collaboration facilitates ongoing interdependent cooperation between teams at each stage of the DevOps cycle.
- User stories to demonstrate how each unit of work in the framework impacts the customer
- Impact mapping that breaks down project goals into subgoals that detail how every action within the cycle connects to the main goal
Continuous Improvement
DevOps practices aim to meet and exceed constantly evolving customer expectations. Continuous Improvement is a core principle that seeks to upgrade operations to deliver higher-quality applications with every new cycle.
Our Six-Step DevOps Implementation Process
A successful implementation process fuses DevOps tools, practices, and expertise to increase an organization’s ability to deliver high-velocity applications and services.
Our strategy comprises six steps that include:
1. Planning
Implementing DevOps differs significantly between organizations, and replacing existing practices with newer methodologies is always challenging. Our initial assessment analyzes your initial state to identify what works, what doesn’t, and how DevOps can optimize the lifecycle to reach your goals.
The planning stage includes all assessment work needed before developers start writing code, and is somewhat similar to the requirements-gathering phase in traditional software development. The main distinction is the feedback collection process, and how architects use that information to create an effective DevOps implementation roadmap.
Following the planning and assessment phase, we introduce the DevOps initiative to your team and proceed to upskill employees to meet the requirements of our strategy.
2. Coding and Building
The next stage is where developers complete coding work and check it into a centralized source code repository. The build phase employs automated tools to retrieve and compile the code into a binary artifact, perform tests, and publish the artifact to a central repository.
Some organizations separate these steps, while others include them together. We typically determine what works best based on the specifics of your project and team capabilities.
3. Integration
Continuous integration involves frequently merging new code written by your team into the centralized repository on a regular schedule. We then use automation to fetch the code, prepare and test the build, and then forward it to a staging environment or repository.
4. Deployment
The DevOps process relies on automated tools to perform continuous deployment once the code passes through automated testing. Some strategies use fragmented deployment strategies where half of users receive new code releases automatically. If issues arise, developers can roll back changes, make improvements, and redeploy. Following a successful redeployment, the rest of the users will receive the updated version.
5. Operations
Once the release is live and being used by customers, the operations team kicks in to ensure everything is running smoothly. Feedback is simultaneously collected by users and put towards improving the application.
6. Monitoring
The cycle concludes with continuous monitoring of the DevOps environment. Data collected at this stage spans numerous metrics and factors, including user actions, application performance, and errors.
In addition to application performance monitoring, this stage tracks the DevOps pipelines for issues that negatively impact process efficiency and employee productivity.
Data collected from this stage is sent to the project manager, who facilitates its integration into the planning stages.
The cycle then repeats, continuously improving the application with each successive stage.
DevOps Consulting Takes Software Development to an Entirely New Level
Professional consulting helps organizations maximize the benefits of DevOps by shortening development cycles to produce superior products, serve customers better, and improve profitability.
Other benefits include:
Improved Collaboration and Employee Satisfaction
DevOps companies comprise experienced software professionals that understand the needs of your operations and development teams. Through a carefully planned strategy, a DevOps consultant helps create a cross-functional team that collaborates more effectively and derives increased satisfaction from the work environment.
DevOps Consultants Help You Leverage Automation
Automation reduces redundant tasks and allows developers to focus on improving features. DevOps experts help you leverage automation tools to streamline your integration and delivery pipelines to make everything run faster.
DevOps puts Customers First
The feedback flow within an effective DevOps strategy ensures developers get the information they need to adapt the software to user demands.
Better applications drive user satisfaction, leading to increased customers and profitability for your organization.
Optimize Your Software Lifecycle with Moonswitch DevOps Consulting
Optimize the software development process with DevOps consulting by Moonswitch. Our experienced team of professionals leverage decades of experience to deliver a strategy that maximizes the potential of your application to drive profitability and user satisfaction.
