DevOps has emerged as a revolutionary cultural movement that has been embraced by the technical community. An increasing number of companies are looking for experienced DevOps consultants as implementing the practice can be quite the undertaking. Though many companies yield substantial hesitations, especially large enterprises, the benefits outweigh the difficulties. Recent articles, summarized below, outline the importance and challenges of DevOps adoption, as well as some helpful tips to keep in mind along the way.
You’re Now Cloud First Are You Ready to Be DevOps First?
Author Jason Bloomberg begins to discuss the less frequented notion of DevOps First in comparison to Cloud First, but then renders the combination of the two “essential” as the benefits of each are enhanced. A DevOps First strategy is also essential in order to effectively employ microservices architectures because the business must maintain alignment with the core intentions of the technology. Bloomberg says this digital transformation must be customer-driven, but also software-empowered. In order to maintain a competitive advantage in today’s world, each business must become a software business, a Cloud First business, and a DevOps first business.
90% of Firms Using DevOps in Some Capacity – but production apps…
Based on a study titled ‘DevOps/Continuous Delivery Tooling: Launchpad for the Digital Enterprise’, Enterprise Management Associates state that 90% of firms claim use of DevOps practices though in reality only support production applications a third of the time. Another finding reads that the core focus points for recent digital business initiatives often include ‘technology that matches competitors’ digital presence’ and ‘faster time to innovation’. Julie Craig, research director of application management at EMA, concludes, “As the pace of business continues to accelerate, coordination across DevOps processes, practices, and tools becomes increasingly important”.
DevOps Practitioners Open Up About Enterprise Adoption Challenges
Caroline Donnelly urges readers to stop thinking of DevOps as something only Silicon Valley firms and startups can do successfully. Though there are large enterprises with successful DevOps integration stories, most similar companies consider the successes an exception rather than a possible standard.
CIOs are understandably skeptical as DevOps appears to be the latest of many IT trends marketed to them as a necessity, as an obvious departure from their current development and operations strategy which will apparently resolve how they are “doing it all wrong”. These hesitations may be valid, but Connelly concludes that these large companies need to be aware of of the small startups in their industry that are developing technical capabilities that could soon steal a chunk of their business.
John Willis on DevOps Evolution, Leadership, and Burnout
Manuel Pais leads a discussion with John Willis, co-author of the “DevOps Handbook” on the evolution of DevOps, during which Willis stresses the importance of a good working environment though it is still too early to relegate any specific DevOps leadership practices as better than another. He also points out the lack of research on burnout in DevOps, and concludes that this issue is therefore probably understated. Regardless, Willis maintains that DevOps is here to stay.
DevOps: Why Getting the Culture Right is the Key to Success
CTO of Ness Digital Engineering, Moshe Kranc, offers that a DevOps strategy seems almost an undeniable improvement. However, in order to implement DevOps, cultural and organizational change must take place. This upending process can prove such a daunting task as often the business side of the company understands DevOps in much less depth than the tech side.
As a result, Kranc coins many of those who have indeed taken on the transformation “Fragile”, almost achieving Agile, but not quite. The best way to overcome this is to get help from companies that can help you develop a clear plan to obtain DevOps on “an evolutionary basis” as the organization should be at the right maturity level as well as maintain a comprehensive understanding of Agile.
Headhunting for DevOps: How to Hire for a Rising Technology
Hiring for DevOps has become increasingly difficult as the field is still relatively new and qualified persons seem few and far between. Author Ankit Gupta lends a few pointers on how to find the best regardless.
- Be familiar with DevOps including its key concept of collaboration.
- Resumes. Don’t just look for the word DevOps as it has become quite the buzzword. Instead, search for words in its toolchain like continuous integration or artifact repository. Also be on the lookout for a mix of experience in project management, development, and infrastructure.
- Check for useful work experience and knowledge of infrastructure automation tools like Chef or Puppet.
- DevOps requires problem solving and commendable communication skills.
- Lastly, Gupta recommends utilizing online sources like LinkedIn and GitHub.
DevOps is a large concept that values collaboration of development and operations teams toward common goals, effectively merging the two teams, in order to streamline projects and pull competitive advantage. Even though its implementation is quite a hefty task, it remains key to maintaining an edge in the competitive world of business.
Planning your DevOps strategy?