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How DevOps can speed up your business

Penned By -
Aniruddha Jawanjal

As a key decision-maker, it feels that you just can’t ignore the big buzz words of technology like AI, Computer Vision, Mobile First and so on, and it is just natural to sideline DevOps Transformation as a buzzword that will fade out soon. But, doing so would mean missing out on a train of fast-paced, technology-supported growth. Today, we try to explain to you this paradigm simply and understandably.

What is DevOps transformation?

‘In an organisation, there is an unwritten coding policy, called throw it over the wall and let the operations team run it. The ops team is usually the one responsible for customer or manager facing tasks and so developers are less worried about buggy code. The incentives are misaligned and there is a vision mismatch between the business and the technology side since everyone is working in their silos.’ Do these sentences remind you of an organisation you have worked/are working with?

DevOps Transformation is a process aimed at breaking down these silos and building an integrated environment working towards a common vision.

While there is no standard definition or way to do it, it is essentially a process that aims at cultural and technological change aimed towards improved communication among business, design, engineering and all other parts of an organisation.

Why should you opt for DevOps transformation?

Without beating around the bush, here are 3 solid reasons why you should opt for DevOps transformation.

  1. Better quality: While better is ambiguous and every tool and consultant offers it, in a DevOps culture, it can be assured by asking the correct questions, such as the biggest worries, what is lacking and so on to the leadership and planning the transformation around it.
  2. More confident releases: Since DevOps addresses essential quality concerns, there will be lesser unpleasant surprises for the team and users. This is because the visibility to the processes increases and the riskiest and critical quality checks are done early on.
  3. Higher flexibility: Flexibility in this paradigm is not about changing the business model but rather constant improvements in the release process as business needs change. Early on, speed might be the most important, but later stability will matter more, and this can be achieved incrementally.

These 3 factors together ensure that there is lesser wasted effort and higher predictability, which will directly reflect on productivity and profitability of your organisation.

What is the journey going to look like?

As you start with DevOps transformation, be aware that it will bring major cultural and procedural changes. It will mark the start of shared decision making. While collaboration and standardisation may be slightly chaotic early on, as time goes by, it will be refined and lead to constant optimisation with the help of the metrics tracked. The process of DevOps transformation is like washing clothes. First, observe. As different clothes are observed for materials and colours, observe where the organisation stands currently on different metrics such as speed and ability to handle change. Next, lather, that is, measure how things work today and find the greatest pain points and bottlenecks. Now, rinse, that is, start fixing the problems that are evident by using tools and techniques such as CI/CD, automation, etc. and streamline them. Lastly, repeat. Remember that this is not a one time process and as new observations crop up, be ready to repeat the process and change incrementally.

What are the challenges of this transformation?

The journey is not going to be without its challenges. Organisations need to reimagine the structure of doing things and culture. It is important to ensure that you don’t underestimate the effort required. Choosing the right metrics is tough. Focusing just on feature development speed without a focus on corresponding better quality will not yield results. The goals set must be realistic and in line with the limited funds that an organisation can allocate. Lastly, the complexity involved in the process of DevOps transformation must not be undermined. Your IT leaders must be able to answers questions like, ‘Will standardisation improve results or delay innovation?’ and your teams should be ready to overcome resistance to change and relearn many ways of doing things.

What is the future going to look like?

The DevOps transformation journey is most going to be an ongoing journey since new paradigms will keep on emerging, but its core mission will remain the same. With the involvement of AI, automation will play a major role in the transformation. AI, with machine learning, will put the focus on anomaly detection, predictive insights and performance baselining which will speed up mundane and repetitive tasks. AI will also take in metrics and put actionable insights from the data. All of this will ultimately sharpen focus on cloud optimization.

Be it about habit, health or DevOps, transformations are tough. Fortunately, we can help you with at least one of them. Feel free to reach out to us for any help or advice on DevOps Transformation and use the comments section to tell us how DevOps Transformation helped your business scale new heights.