DevOps Adoption in the Enterprise
While Scaling up the Business and working with remote teams with different skillsets and cultures, I realize the need for processes and automation to improve productivity and collaboration. Hence, I figure out the need for DevOpsImplementation Strategy and Deployment in Enterprises. At the growth stage, with 3+ Years experience of in delivering more than 55 projects in various domains for Startups and Enterprises, including -
- Mobility
- Big Data
- Internet of Things
- Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud
Getting Started with DevOps Adoption
We Started transformation towards DevOps Strategy by adopting processes like Integration of DevOps Tools, Processes, and Data into our work culture. Parallelly, We Started adopting different Infrastructure architectures, Building Private Cloud, Docker, Apache Mesos, and Kubernetes.
Initial Steps To DevOps Adoption
- Enforcing Rules with the help of the right tools - Agile board integration with SCM, Build Tool, and Deployment Tool
- Collaboration Tools - Rocket Chat Integration with Taiga, GitLab, Jenkins
- Continuous Integration and Delivery
- Explicit Dependency Management
- Automated Testing
- Hands-On Training
We started by creating two separate teams from the existing pool of developers to adopt the DevOps culture for new Projects in Big Data and Mobile Applications. After Initial hurdles in adaptation to Collaboration Tools and the new delivery pipeline, the results were extraordinary.
Results After Initial Phase
- Improved Performance & Productivity
- Less Manual Work
- Better Collaboration and Communication
- Developers Getting more Empowered and Involved in Delivery
- Proper Dependency and Configuration Management
DevOps encourages collaboration and communication between the developers and operations teams in all stages of the Software Development Life Cycle. Click to explore about, Top Six Challenges in DevOps Adoption
What are the significant challenges to DevOps Adoption?
- Cultural Shift in the way Things were being developed
- Changing Mindset for Adaptation.
- Support for Legacy Environments
- Integrating Security and Compliance on new Setup
- No support for Overlay Networks
Today, most companies and organizations have already adopted DevOps or are on the verge of adopting them in their projects shortly. But this adoption needs to be taken extra care of; it's not like a trend. Let's follow it and implement it. Start from scratch and look at your requirements. It should not be the case that you know the appropriate tool and you start using it then and there. That approach is suitable for only short-term use as it is not future-proof. So it is better to gather as much information as possible and try integrating them into the DevOps environment. DevOps Adoption should revolve around the best practices associated with the DevOps.
Best practices include test automation, continuous delivery, deployment, configuration management, and many more. These could help achieve efficiency. Everything has its pros and cons, and DevOps is no different. Still, some companies state that they cannot grab the full use of DevOps and its functionalities. It is better to engineer the practical DevOps into stages or sectors where you want to implement features of DevOps. Here are some of the flaws which revolve around the companies and organizations.
No Proper Governance
- DevOps feature, namely "automation," helps reduce time-to-market, and this is only one feature that is taken into consideration; there are many more.
- The issue arises when people start using it without any compliance or anything. This issue later shows up in the end product resulting in bad reviews or wrong product quality. This could lead up to product failure as well.
Using Tools without DevOps
- There are many cases where companies started using the tools of the DevOps rather than first trying to understand the concept of DevOps and trying to implement them in their environment.
- Like any configuration management tool, a particular tool needs to be fully understood and figure out how it could be added to your project efficiently. It is not always the case that direct implementation would result in good.
No Monitoring and Logging
- DevOps provides many properties; out of those, monitoring and logging are there.
- But getting dependent upon it and starting to ignore it is not the best approach. The main focus of any company should be on the logging and monitoring system there, and those systems should also cover the DevOps throughout.
Single Team
- This is the worst approach, and if you want to add DevOps to your company, you should not be limited to only one team.
- Most enterprises often make one team to cover the entire DevOps functionalities and features. Practically this motive cannot be achieved, and everything needs to be distributed appropriately within teams.
What are the solutions for DevOps implementation?
In the flaws mentioned above, one common thing was no proper planning and direct use of services. And most of the company's projects go in vain because of the Improper implementation of DevOps. Here are some ways and qualities an organization and enterprise should adapt.
Appropriate Teams
- Work should not be limited to a particular team and should be distributed into sections or sectors to provide them with the necessary data. It is building up a strong backbone for your project.
- It would help if you had many teams that could handle a particular section to provide an efficient result. And the most critical team which every company must attach to is the security team which looks after DevOps.
Proper Monitoring and Logging
- One organization should take full ownership of its DevOps environment by saying that you should put close eyes on the behavior of the environment of the DevOps so that you will be notified early if any problem could arise shortly.
- Logs and metrics provide data that would give a lifeline to a project on the verge of getting affected.
- Multiple logging and monitoring tools could be the best practice for the DevOps infrastructure you want to attain.
Proper Governance
- You should maintain an environment that suits all the requirements and compliance from the client and your sides.
- No unauthorized access should be given to the unauthorized person so that your data or information will remain safe.
- Compliance should also be looked at very carefully as no deeds should be done which might hamper the quality or the reputation of the organization.
- Keep a proper check on personnel having the authorization to use the resources. Integration of the DevOps approach not only builds the companies' efficient method but also helps them to deliver their product to the customers in a short period.
Quality Assurance which could be achieved with DevOps, is not something that could be ignored. Broadly, there are so many approaches present that we cannot ignore. So when we talk about the latest trends in technology, there might be the case that if you don't have a good team, then some members in the project know about the new technology trends.
DevOps Culture Adoption Guide for Organizations to Leverage Faster and Reliable Software Releases for Continuous Learning and Continuous Improvement. Click to explore about, Step by Step Approach to Build a DevOps Culture
Industry-wise DevOps Solution
During the Transformation Towards Agile & DevOps, DevOps needs a platform where we can define a workflow with different Integrations. Implementing DevOps Culture into your workflow requires using of specialized tools.
Deployed Solution in Healthcare Startup
Then we implemented this approach in our HealthCare Startup, RayCare, where we had multiple workflows and Big Data loads. The Technology Stack for the startup was the latest, cutting-edge, and tall enough to leverage Microservices.
- Stood up Development, Staging, and Production Environment with almost Zero Parity.
- Jenkins Jobs for Android, iOS, Angular, and Backend
- Highly Available and Distributed Cassandra Cluster
- Ansible Playbooks for turning the environment up and down with one command.
- Using Docker for Development and Staging Environment.
Deployed Solution in Analytics Startup
Introducing DevOps practices in an Analytics Startup with well-experienced Database Administrators was a great experience. The aim was to faster the data loading, database provisioning, and isolating environments for a team working in three distinct locations. The main highlights of the implementation are:
- Bridging the gap between 3 different development locations by using relevant tools to improve collaboration.
- Writing scripts to automate the process of Data Operations as much as possible.
- Application Delivery Pipeline of an app with multiple versions running for different clients simultaneously.
Oracle Partner for ServiceNow Integration and DevOps
The aim was to integrate complex Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) with Service Now, a modern IT Services Management solution for easing the provisioning of Oracle-based resources through Service Now. The solution provided is capable of:
- Automating Oracle DB Binaries Provisioning
- Running Chef Recipes from Oracle Enterprise Manager
- A Restful Service to Trigger DB Provisioning Recipe
- Item listing in Service Now to trigger Restful Service on the successful transaction of an item.
- The admin approval process for the infrastructure process.
Deployed Solution in WebRTC-based Calling Platform
The company is entirely dedicated to free calling apps for mobile iOS and Android platform like iOS Android to the phone number with the facility to call all around the globe.
- Technologies: VMware, Couchbase, PostgreSQL, CentOS 7, Zabbix, and much more
- Hardware: From OVH dedicated server
- Virtualization: Using Vmware bare metal
- All services: On VMware Virtual Machines, The system had more than 10 NodeJS Apps, Highly Available and Distributed CouchDB Cluster, which was changed to MongoDB in later stages. We made the application delivery pipeline fully automated using Ansible and Jenkins. The infrastructure was also made mutable using Ansible to scale up and down according to load.
Deployed Solution For Microsoft Technology Stack in HealthCare Wellness
Migrating applications powered by .NET Ecosystem to DevOps-powered application lifecycle pipeline is a challenging job. The application was deployed on a private cloud powered by OpenStack with the following features -
- OpenStack Images for .NET Ecosystem
- Jenkins Jobs for Continuous Integration
- Integration of OpenStack with Object Storage powered by Ceph
- Visual Studio Integration with popular DevOps Tools
Approach to DevOps Adoption
During the Transformation Towards Agile & DevOps, we realized that DevOps needs a platform where we can define a workflow with different Integrations. DevOps Solution helps you Automate, Monitor, and Analyse Application Delivery with Continuous Container Delivery Pipeline, which helps you get more savings on the cloud. To learn more about DevOps culture, we advise taking the following steps -
- Learn more about DevOps Engineering
- Know the difference between SRE and DevOps
- Click here to explore about Continuous Intelligence in DevOps
- Check out the Advanced Guide to Test Data Management in DevOps
- Explore Google Cloud Solutions for Reducing Operational Costs
