DevOps Culture- Aligning People, Processes and Tools
Technology is the epicenter of modern business today. With a constant need for tech development, the DevOps approach has been widely adopted to provide agility and remove silos between teams. But DevOps is not just the implementation of technology or setting rules for the organization. A collaborative environment can only be facilitated if people, processes and tools work in tandem with each other. This can mean a major cultural shift for many organizations, without which they can’t realize the full promise of DevOps. In this blog, we will discuss the benefits of DevOps Culture and how to implement it.
DevOps Culture- Aligning People, Processes and Tools
The essence of DevOps Culture lies in collaboration, shared responsibility between teams and quick feedback for faster turnaround times. This entails building multidisciplinary and autonomous teams that leverage tools and technologies, like automation, to deliver better output. DevOps culture encourages information sharing and places importance on operational requirements as much as architecture, design and development. This gives developers a better understanding of what the users need and involves operations teams in the development process so that they can add to the product from a customer’s point of view.
The cultural shift that an organization needs to make for this degree of collaboration involves processes that encourage continuous learning and improvement as well as high empathy and trust between teams. The goal is to have a unified operations and development team that values fast feedback and utilizes automation to build, test and release software rapidly and reliably. DevOps culture enables a high-performance engineering environment with improved business outcomes.
Creating the right alignment in DevOps Culture
Change is difficult for any organization as it is for most individuals. From conflict resolution to creating a balance between people and technology, adopting DevOps Culture can be challenging. The need is to build the culture ground up to have a true DevOps transformation. This is rooted in the fact that it is easier to introduce and demonstrate DevOps to smaller teams with a higher chance of successful adoption. Here are a few key considerations for efficiently initiating a DevOps transformation.
Communication
Open communication is fundamental to establishing a DevOps culture. The very concept of DevOps culture revolves around combatting information silos between different teams. Inefficiencies occur when developers and system administrators do not communicate regularly and clearly. A feedback mechanism needs to be put in place to ensure quick response between teams and fast issue resolution.
New Processes
A new workflow demands new processes that support collaboration between development and operations teams throughout the entire product lifecycle. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) have always been central to the DevOps processes. But only a few companies are recognizing continuous deployment as a part of this process. Continuous Deployment enables teams to implement small changes in the code during production. These can also be rolled back easily if need be and can be deployed for a small percentage of customers. This gives a great degree of flexibility to companies by which they can cater to changing customer demands without the need for breaking the build.
The Right Tools
Technology is an important part of DevOps and needs consideration while building DevOps culture. Development and operations teams use some tools for tasks like version control, issue tracking and resolution, and monitoring. Apart from these traditional toolsets, there is a need to add technology that enables CI/CD. This can be achieved by automation that allows the fast feedback loop which is critical to the success of DevOps culture. Automation not only makes processes more efficient but also encourages collaboration and frees up resources for more critical tasks.
Learning from Mistakes
Many a time DevOps teams are operating in an environment where they are afraid to make mistakes. This restricts innovation as employees will be tempted to follow the tried and tested path. Enough trust needs to be built among employees that will enable them to try new methodologies and learn from mistakes if there are any. DevOps encourages a “blameless retrospective” which helps teams continuously improve by reflecting on their existing way of working. The idea is to acknowledge that failures can happen and enable quick learning and recovery.
Summary
Many a time DevOps teams are operating in an environment where they are afraid to make mistakes. This restricts innovation as employees will be tempted to follow the tried and tested path. Enough trust needs to be built among employees that will enable them to try new methodologies and learn from mistakes if there are any. DevOps encourages a “blameless retrospective” which helps teams continuously improve by reflecting on their existing way of working. The idea is to acknowledge that failures can happen and enable quick learning and recovery.