The trend that has been increasingly promoted and adopted is the automation of operations in an organization. Automating company operations is a way of speedy performance of tasks and getting them done round the clock.
DevOps gets easier when you realize that your organization is capable of adopting changes without any difficulty and have a right approach towards using the tools that have the potential to realize DevOps in your organization. There are some principles and functions which are supposed to be implemented at every stage of DevOps to ensure success. These are six tools also known as six Cs of DevOps which works as a cycle. Six Cs in this cycle are:
- Continuous Business Planning: Continuous business planning does include several steps from identification of skills, involves probability of outcomes and comes to resources required. This requires a comprehensive understanding of what a software engineer does naturally as an essential part of the overall process of problem-solving. This requires a deep dive into the problem that is to be solves and working on iterating solutions to be delivered continuously.
- Collaborative Development: Developers and operations have been wholly separate wings in IT organizations. This is usually observed that these two wings work in non-cooperative way. But according to recent Gartner report- “Successful DevOps needs business, development, Quality Analyst, and operations in IT organizations are required to coordinate and play significant roles at various stages of the application lifecycle. As per the report, it may be difficult, even impossible; to eliminate silos, but collaboration is essential.”
- Continuous Testing: The testing pat in DevOps is easy to overlook, until it starts giving additional burden. According to the industry experts- “the cost of quality is the cost of failure.” Continuous testing is silent but equally an essential and critical component of DevOps, and is as important as the continuous integration and continuous delivery is. Continuous testing is not merely a QA function, as it actually begins in the development environment. Now, this is not possible for the developers to just throw the code to QA for testing. In DevOps process, everyone is so involved in testing. Developers have to make sure that they are providing test data sets along with delivering error-free code. They also assist test engineers in configuring the testing environment, so that they can be as close as possible to the production environment.
The benefits of continuous testing are worth making the efforts for. Testing in a DevOps environment is helpful for developers in balancing quality and speed. Use of tools and automation techniques helps reducing the cost of testing and enables engineers to be time efficient. The most important part of continuous testing is that conducting integration testing earlier in the process shortens test cycles.
- Continuous Release and Deployment: One of the significant aspects of DevOps is the consideration of release and deployment of the software. Companies not only require ensuring availability of new software, but they must ensure that the software is deployed effectively. Automating both, release and deployment, can be helpful in this. Starting up with release and deployment may underpin several other capabilities, and also it has a great impact upon organization’s ability of resolving issues related to production and overall agility. The ability of automated release and deployment to speed up patching security vulnerability, inculcating new features, executing disaster recovery and arrangement of test environments is invaluable in all conditions.
- Continuous Monitoring: When it comes to automate DevOps, organizations must arrange a monitoring mechanism to observe and watching their applications’ performance closely. So many companies are not able to answer a common question i.e. “what is the normal performance for our applications?” Whether continuous or not, but companies must make an attempt for, and by simple monitoring of their applications and infrastructure they can easily be able to. Once this practice is set up, the beginning of the process of automation of would be feasible for the teams. Instrumentation of standard process of building removes the surplus burden of observing the behaviour of applications and makes visibility the default.
To be confident about the continuous delivery system, organizations need to have everything wholly instrumented and to ensure continuous monitoring all over the place. In order to automate the whole process, companies must be having tools to observe what is happening and have the ability to respond in every situation. Observability is considered to be one of the necessary prerequisites for making the process automated and continuous.
- Collaborative Customer feedback and Optimization: This is the most important stage of the whole process of DevOps. An organization must be having an effective mechanism of collecting customer feedback in order to address customer needs appropriately. This enables organization for receiving immediate response from the customers regarding product, its features and utility. This can be proved significantly crucial for you to modify accordingly.
In making a good DevOps organization, taking care of these six phases are highly effective. This is not a must to have model but being a sophisticated model it has potential of making an efficient organization and provide ease and effectiveness in the process of DevOps. This would give you a fair idea of instruments at be used at different phases of DevOps and will make the process more lucrative.
