What is DevOps?
DevOps, a combination term for the “development and operations” is a key set of practices and tools that are designed to increase an organization’s efficiency and punctuality; this is done by combining the processes of development, operations, and quality assurance teams/ processes of the organization.
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What is DevOps Culture?
Developing a DevOps culture is essential and at the same time, the changes take some time as well. This is so because the DevOps principles system is a cultural change that would yield positive results in the organization when there is an increase in transparency, communication, and collaboration between the teams involved in the software building process.
The principle of DevOps’ contribution towards the organization’s culture comes in two ways: from the teams and the organization.
But, why is the culture of DevOps via the DevOps principles important? The culture of DevOps helps in finding a mutual meeting point amidst clashing goals.
To develop a DevOps culture, the organization has to begin with redefining the teams’ responsibilities. It is wise to remember that redefining the responsibilities may take some time as it might take some time naturally to adapt to new responsibilities and the teams would need some motivation to forgo the same.
In brief, the culture of DevOps will be successful only when there is smooth and transparent communication between the organization and teams.
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What are DevOps goals?
Why should you set the goals of DevOps? The main idea behind setting DevOps goals is to ensure optimal development of an idea to reality. By setting DevOps goals, the organization will be able to deliver results with better efficiency and much better effectiveness. Usually, the DevOps principles are followed by the goals of DevOps.
But, how to set DevOps goals? In general, the concept of setting a goal will be effective in reducing the failure rates (especially in the launching of updates and others of such nature), improving deployments’ frequency, lessening recovery time, and shortening launch time.
However, the goals of DevOps are to be set based on your company’s growth expectations, the current state of growth, and other applicable factors.
The software industry has two takes on the DevOps goals aspect:
- To set attainable goals
- To set extremely high goals
By setting attainable goals, the DevOps teams will be able to interact and professionally bond over the victories. And, by setting extremely high goals, the teams will work together in attaining the same (for, when the goals are high, it would need more manpower to achieve the same and thus, the teamwork).
Furthermore, when the goals are not met by the teams, they still will be able to bond over the fact that they worked together as power teams at least.
It is important to note that, for teams to celebrate their team spirit in a high goal DevOps culture, the organization should be flexible and understanding of the teams’ ability to attain the goals; this will help in attaining the goals with less pressure.
Fundamentally, the goals of DevOps include:
- Breaking down the communication barriers and other such barriers
- The creation of cross-functional teams; will help in understanding the other teams’ work in real-time. This will eventually help in the development of team morale.
- Enhancing the flow of ideas and executing the same in a reasonable time
Briefly, it can be said that just like every business is unique, so are its DevOps goals. And, the only common ground among every goal of DevOps in DevOps culture is the enhancement of workplace morale and efficiency.
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What are the DevOps principles?
To begin with, you might wonder what is the principle of DevOps? Generally, the DevOps principles are generated based on the DevOps objectives. The DevOps objectives include the introduction of code review systems, and the automation of building, testing, deploying, monitoring, issue tracking, and giving feedback.
DevOps objectives are generated in any organization to enhance the launch time and to refine the working process to improve the overall work culture in general.
Following are the key DevOps principles generated via the DevOps objectives.
Collaborative environment
A collaborative environment is the first and most important aspect of DevOps practices. The development and operations team via DevOps principles can produce better and effective results when working in a collaborative environment; the teams will be able to work towards achieving the common objectives that will benefit the organization at large.
The collaborative environment ensures that there is improvement in sharing ideas and executing them via enhanced communication, transparency, and sharing of work responsibilities.
It is right to say that the overall concept of DevOps itself revolves around the need for collaboration among various teams in the organization.
For several decades, the development team and operation team have always worked on different teams. This has always resulted in differences of opinions, different understanding, and more of such sort. These aspects always reflect on the overall quality and outcome of the product.
With DevOps, the teams can continue to collaborate around the clock, consistently. The collaboration will be in real-time, and thus the organization will be benefited to a great extent. The real-time collaboration includes allowing the teams to make quick changes and more of such sort. This ensures a stable and robust work environment.
Achieving collaboration in an organization using DevOps is easy. To begin the collaboration process, you need to bring together the teams with a common goal. In the next step, you need to develop mutual trust and respect among the teams and ensure that everyone in the team is heard. It is important to make sure that all the teams thrive with diversity. Laying a clear roadmap to goal will benefit the organization to a great extent.
Enhanced accountability
In the presence of DevOps work culture, the work is shared across the teams and at every point of work, there will be a contribution by each team to some extent. This will create a sense of responsibility, resulting in enhanced accountability among the teams.
The concept of accountability is very important in organizations. To simply put, whenever there is a mishap/ mistake, the organization would not function healthily if the workforce keeps passing the blame.
Without the accountability culture, everyone would hesitate to be a part of any team. There would be unhealthy workplace practices, which eventually would affect the organization and the organization’s goals.
With accountability implemented via DevOps culture, the teams will be ready to take calculated risks. Furthermore, people will become more approachable at the workplace with accountability practiced at the organization.
Eventually, the communication between the teams, external businesses, as well as stakeholders will increase exponentially.
Accountability can be initiated by asking the workforce to step forward confidently with their problems. When the problems are being addressed, the accountability will increase to a great extent.
In short, being heard gives the space for people to grow in the organization. Thus accountability is ensured.
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Gradual improvements
Gradual improvement is a necessity of DevOps practices. The culture of DevOps is a belief system where the organization believes in gradual improvements, while the teams work towards betterment every day. With a strong team spirit and morale, the overall productivity will increase every day.
Gradual improvement in the DevOps creates quality awareness among the involved people and integration of QA & testing activities in all the DevOps activities as well as in all the relevant people.
The establishment of the gradual improvement culture in the organization via DevOps is easy.
The successful establishment begins with supportive and engaged leadership. Such kind of leadership can be achieved by being supportive, open, and most importantly willing to consider every suggestion without any bias. The sign of good leadership is providing a safe space for all opinions.
The next crucial aspect of ensuring gradual improvement in the organization is consistency. Along with collecting regular suggestions, always ensure that the suggestions are improved on consistently. Finally, whenever the suggestions are worked on, discuss the same with the relevant person(s)/ team(s). This will increase the team morale to improve consistently.
Automation
With the deployment of automated processes in the organization among the teams in receiving feedback/responding to feedback, the overall improvement will be continuous and progressive. The automation can be done to streamline CI/CD pipeline processes as well. For better results, the automation process can be built via the collaborative effort of the teams as well.
Automation of DevOps highly benefits the fast-growing industrial world. DevOps automation plays a key role in the customer satisfaction percentile. The automation of DevOps will make the organization profiled at a higher level. This ensures that the organization becomes more efficient.
Automation is useful in building continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows.
Currently, IT automation, business automation, robotic process automation, industrial automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are popular choices in the automation of DevOps.
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Focus shift
Focus shift is the final aspect of DevOps practices. With the DevOps culture, the teams can collaborate and shift their focus from non-working strategies to working strategies. This will help in the fulfillment of customers’ needs in the most efficient manner.
Conclusion
The conclusion for a DevOps principles blog would summarize the main points discussed in the article, such as the goals of DevOps, the key principles and practices that make up the methodology, and the benefits that organizations can realize by implementing DevOps.
It would also likely highlight the importance of collaboration and communication across development and operations teams in order to effectively implement and maintain a DevOps culture.
Additionally, it would be useful to mention that DevOps is a journey, not a destination and it is an ongoing process of continuous improvement.
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