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  • Gunjan Syal
    • Apr 20, 2020
    • 3 min read

DevOps Journey (Free)

Updated: Aug 15

Gunjan is joined by Maria Pronin from Microsoft to discuss stages of a successful DevOps journey on transformations. Read Maria's blog post below the video.



DevOps Journey Summary

by Maria Pronin, April 2020


Nowadays, a successful company must always watch how customers’ wants and needs change in the current digital world. New opportunities and capabilities disturb ‘business as usual’ at a higher rate than ever. Examples are e-commerce, streaming, ride-sharing etc.

Therefore, to keep a competitive advantage, enterprises must continuously undergo digital transformation, i.e. give customers what they want in the format that they like. The examples are online banking, e-commerce support for retail, mobile capabilities, support via chat.

A successful strategy must take all this into account:

  • A strategy is what gives a competitive advantage

  • People and culture is what sustains that advantage

  • Technology is the tool that helps to implement that strategy

Digital transformation is NOT the technology or set of tools; it is about continually bringing value to customers.

Key aspects of successful digital transformation are:

  • A strategy is well-aligned with current customer needs.

  • Culture is agile and welcomes constant change and innovation.

  • Technologies and tools are tuned to the needs of strategy.

DevOps is a delivery methodology that covers everything mentioned before. DevOps includes people, processes, and tools. DevOps can help companies to continuously digitally transform.

What is Azure DevOps - union of people processes and tools that help organizations to continuously deliver value to customers

Why Azure DevOps:

  • Higher deployment frequency

  • Faster lead time for changes

  • Faster time to recover

  • Lower change failure rate

  • Faster time to market

  • Increased revenue

Spend more time innovating and less time ‘keeping the lights on’:

  • New work - more

  • Unplanned work and rework - less

  • Remediating security issues - less

  • Working on user identified bugs - less

  • Customer support – less

DevOps concepts:

  • Continuous Integration - Improves software development quality and speed. When you use Azure Pipelines or Jenkins to build apps in the cloud and deploy to Azure, each time you commit code, it is automatically built, tested and bugs are detected faster.

  • Continuous Delivery - Ensures that code and infrastructure are always in a production-deployable state. By combining continuous integration and infrastructure as code (IaC), you will achieve identical deployments and the confidence to deploy to production at any time.

  • Continuous deployment with CI/CD - With continuous deployment, you can automate the entire process from code commit to production if your CI/CD tests are successful. Using CI/CD practices, paired with monitoring tools, you will be able to safely deliver features to your customers as soon as they are ready.

  • Continuous Learning & Monitoring - With Azure Application Insights you can identify how your applications are performing and test if the recent deployment made things better or worse. Using CI/CD practices, paired with monitoring tools, you will be able to safely deliver features to your customers as soon as they are ready.

Reactive Operation:

  • Design and Develop

  • Deliver

  • Operate – Governance, Security, Monitoring, Automation, Resiliency


Moving to proactive Operations:

  • Develop – Resiliency and Monitoring

  • Deliver – Security and Governance

  • Operate – Automation

DevOps Delivery Milestones:

  • Infrastructure as a code

  • Continuous Integration

  • Automated Testing

  • Continuous Deployment

  • Release Management

  • App Performance monitoring

  • Load testing and Autoscaling

  • Alerting

Activities:

1. Plan + Track

  • Status

  • Plan Work

  • Manage work

  • Track Progress

2. Develop + Test

  • Write Code

  • Unit Test

  • Version Control

  • Build

  • Build Verification

3. Release

  • Automated functional testing

  • Integration testing environment

  • Pre-production environment

  • Staging environment

4. Monitor + Learn

  • Monitor

  • Feedback

Maturity:

  • Silo Teams to Cross Functional teams

  • Manual Infra to Automated Environment

  • No Central code repo to Well Structured code

  • No/Manual test to Automated testing

  • Manual Deployment to One-click deployment

  • No/Manual Monitoring to Automated monitoring

We can help establish a roadmap for your DevOps journey. Let's connect and discuss your specific transformation needs.