How to implement DevOps

Even heavyweight mastodons (banks, oil and gas, engineering and other industries) are seduced by the benefits that Agile in general and DevOps in particular promises. So the question about implementation is not “To be or not to be?” but “How to do it well, quickly, simply and not too expensive?”

Like any idea, DevOps cannot be implemented in its pure form – in practice, each company tries to take the best from this approach, adapting it to its specifics and introducing it gradually. If you want it to go well, you should use the help of devops service providers. They know exactly what steps you need to take to make devops implementation a success. This way, you will get reliable helpers to help you make the right decisions and get great results.

Main steps of DevOps implementation

Gradual DevOps implementation can be reduced to the following steps:

1. Clearly articulate the challenges you want devops to solve, e.g., ensure 100 builds are produced daily, create a deployment pipeline, etc;
2. Discuss the solution with your team (developers, testers, administrators, tech support) to identify the most problematic areas in your processes and choose which automation tools to implement first.
3. Ensure employees understand and embrace CALMS – the 5 core principles of DevOps: culture, automation, lean, measurement, and social. Rebuild business processes and organize teams around the product, not by functional division.
4. Automate the part of IT processes that is more needed and appropriate, such as testing or preparing server environments for a working solution. Define metrics to measure the success of the processes being automated.
5. Analyze changes: processes, employee attitudes, key metrics. Do the results from using DevOps cover the effort spent on implementing this approach? If not, you need to go back to step 1, revisit the objectives or try other organizational and technical tools. If the benefits of a partial implementation of DevOps are already visible, the approach should be scaled to other processes and projects.

Nevertheless, despite these challenges, DevOps and other Agile digitalization tools continue to be implemented in our lives, changing work processes and the minds of their participants. The concept of DevOps also continues to evolve, transforming into operational reliability assurance – SRE. You will be able to do everything correctly, just use our tips.