When you are looking to implement DevOps for your organization, there are a few key considerations that you need to keep in mind at costs. There are several pros and cons that you need to think about before investing.
And, it is quite an investment anyway, not to mention the mandatory transition period where the workforce needs to come to terms with the latest innovations and implementations. The following post is for the venture capitalists who would like to build a DevOps roadmap for their organization. Here is how you need to go about it.
Assess the risks and understand the benefits
The roadmap to success is in the details. The better you plan to keep in mind the details, the better it is for your organization or business model. Before you dive deep into the nitty-gritty of DevOps, you need to ask yourself what your exact requirements are? There can be a variety of reasons to invest in DevOps.
These include requirements like speeding up the deployment of the application, the need of an IT team to function more efficiently and effectively or to bridge the communication gaps that exist across teams and departments within the confines of the same business organization. Since there is no standard solution to every problem, you must think the requirement through to understand better the particular solution that will work in your case
Keep in mind that it is all about choosing the optimal strategy, and the better prepared you are as to the understanding of the bottlenecks and challenges that exist within your infrastructure, the faster you will come to a perfect DevOps solution that will be fruitful and complementary to your business goals.
The people are important
When you are thinking about a DevOps implementation strategy, then you need to keep in mind that the team will consist of your entire workforce. This means everyone from your organization, including the developers, managers as well as the executives are active members. Everyone is in charge of the implementation and the functioning of the tool.
If you are heading the team, then the onus is on you to make everyone involved aware of the upcoming changes that will get implemented and the benefits that everyone will gleam off with the DevOps strategy. As long as every member of the team actively participates and contributes towards the implementation, you will face no down-time or complications during the transition.
According to the Salesforce DevOps team of experts, you need to start by appointing a leader to curate and assign jobs during the start of the process. Team members will need a bit of time to get used to the proceedings and process the changes. This allows the workforce to grow into their new roles.
Keep in mind that to compliment the tools in place, you might need to hire a specialized workforce in the future. So, it is essential to keep your options open.
You need to change the culture
There are several critical practices that an organization should encourage within their ranks and the workforce. The primary is the importance of communication. DevOps makes for smoother communication between different teams working within the same organization.
However, building the culture of trust, mutual sharing, responsibility, and effective collaboration requires patience and strict company guidelines. Make sure that your teams are transparent with respect to the day-to-day functioning to get the implementation for DevOps just right for your venture.
Our experts argue that to start with, you need to implement the tools for communication and knowledge sharing as a priority one and go on building into complex micro-architecture. When you are looking to adopt the right practices as far as DevOps is concerned, you need the right tools for the job.
What is included in DevOps?
Here are some of the critical facets of DevOps that you need to keep in mind before investing.
- You will get continuous integration and delivery system
- There will be features for automatic testing
- With DevOps project management is streamlined and agile
- Complete control over constant data monitoring and logging
- Migration of big-data into cloud architecture and matrix
- IaC or Infrastructure as Code is another crucial feature of DevOps
- Lastly, a detailed microservices architecture to make day-to-day dealings streamlined
Every element of the DevOps strategy has been designed keeping in mind the need to simplify the business dealings and software development and implementation; e.g., the IaC is responsible for the elimination of the manual work required for the deployment of the newly developed tools with a consistent configuration from the previous versions. This helps in speeding up the process while circumventing various failures and the common deployment errors.
The trick is to start small
There is no need for you to scale the DevOps to cover the entirety of your business right from the start. You will need to allow time for building expertise and practice the trial runs with small scale changes. Start with a pilot project and test the waters. This will also allow you to troubleshoot possible roadblocks when going for substantial scale changes.
There will be struggles
Yes, it is not a walk in the park. And, chances are there will be failures, complications, and roadblocks. But, keep in mind that with the right third-party DevOps team and experts, you will be back on track in no time. It is an ongoing process, and there is no fixed formula that will work forever. So, be prepared to make modifications and change your strategies as and when the need arises.
However, it is needless to stress on the fact that DevOps is a sound long-term investment that will pay dividends like no other strategy when it comes to bridging the gap between the developers, IT teams, and the executives along with the stakeholders. Get a team ready and discuss the matter with your fellow professionals and make sure to work with an expert DevOps team to make sure to have access to the best possible tools and a smooth transition.
Author Bio-
Sujain Thomas is a writer and SEO expert. Nowadays Sujain manages and writes for Salesforce DevOps. Her primary focus is on “Salesforce DX”. She is responsible for building content that helps IT professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.