DevOps help your business to be competitive in an ever-changing market.
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) across the entire applications’ service life cycle. Put simply, it is about breaking down silos between the two and bringing developers and operations specialists together.
Through close collaboration, teams can leverage one another’s competence and employees aren’t bound to just one repetitive task. Instead, they can take end-to-end responsibility, solve new challenges and explore other areas, thereby making their job far more engaging. It is becoming the de facto way to efficiently manage your IT landscape, especially if you are pursuing a strategy to become a digital enterprise. Its adoption improves product readiness and customer satisfaction through faster time to market, as well as securing constant alignment with overall business objectives.
Through close collaboration, teams can leverage one another’s competence and employees aren’t bound to just one repetitive task. Instead, they can take end-to-end responsibility, solve new challenges and explore other areas, thereby making their job far more engaging.
“We have seen how Agile transformation has set the standard on how teams should collaborate. They should now focus on DevOps because it takes it to the next level,” says Anton Rytterstedt, DevOps Transformation Lead at Tietoevry. “It changes the mindset and the culture within the organisation and introduces automation and new tools that enable teams to become self-sufficient.”
Before the adoption of DevOps, it is essential to be prepared for a significant cultural and organisational change. “When starting, customers think it will be a year-long transformation project, but in fact it is a journey towards the optimisation of IT services that never really ends,” notes Tapani Tirkkonen, DevOps Lead Solution Consultant. “A company that wants to be a leader never stops trying to continually improve.”
He adds that there is often a great deal of enthusiasm in the beginning, but reality may strike: “Customers suddenly realise that everything may be slower and require more effort than expected. If you aren’t fully committed, then you can get stuck halfway. Others see DevOps as a life vest for a failing project; if you think you can complete a transformation in just a few months and get back on track, you are wrong. It will only make things worse.”
One common mistake Rytterstedt has seen many times is companies trying to cut corners by mimicking other successful models: “They will probably fail because they haven't understood how to adopt those models into their own organisation, products and value streams.”
With the words of caution out of the way, Tirkkonen emphasises that the correct adoption of DevOps can give considerable advantage in solving problems and addressing shortcomings: “All in all, it’s an attitude to develop efficiently and maintain what you have developed, especially when you are doing that in a modern environment.”
A well-reasoned DevOps journey begins with an initial assessment. This provides a platform from which you can fully assess and understand your current state and clarify where you want to go. It’s important to remember that each DevOps journey is unique and must be tailored for each enterprise because some paths may be unsuitable.
Tirkkonen explains that by gathering an overall picture of the customer, there is a clearer understanding of the value streams, organisation, challenges and applications or products: “We draw up a roadmap together and then help them start implementing it. However, it's important that the customer understands that there are elements they can't skip.”
Once the assessment is done, our expert teams can also provide solution implementation and platforms that include the tools that customers need to have in place.
Rytterstedt has one important piece of advice: “Too many customers see DevOps tools listed on some website list, implement them and have a false impression that they are now doing DevOps. The tools are just enablers. What matters is how you put them into use, the processes around them and how you organise your work.”
“When we talked about DevOps a couple of years ago and many customers were still immature, we would have highlighted three elements: employees’ mindset, organisational culture and technology. Once you combined those, you would have had an efficient DevOps,” shares Rytterstedt.
Today, with the level of maturity in the market quickly growing, DevOps has become a fundamental building block in the Next-Gen Enterprise Services Framework that has been defined for modern and highly competitive enterprises.
Rytterstedt points to the services being delivered: “You have the Next-Gen Enterprise Services Framework handling everything from tickets to operations. If we look at development, it’s about enabling the team to perform to the best of their abilities, to deliver a product with quality and to reduce its release cycles.”
Moreover, the extensive use of automation is an important part of DevOps to remove manual steps throughout the product lifecycle process. DevOps practices have been further empowered through AI and Machine Learning, technologies that we expect will be used more and more comprehensively in the future.
“In addition to AI helping systems to understand and predict things, there is also the growing use of the public cloud. It is changing our idea of operations and infrastructure, giving more room to development,” believes Tirkkonen.
An advantage of DevOps is the provision of short feedback loops, meaning that developers are notified about issues early in the development life cycle. This saves time, lowers costs and reduces the number of errors out in production.
“If you are working in an environment where it is important to quickly make changes in production to present new features to end-users, DevOps is perfect. It also guarantees efficiency. You have better quality control and can rectify errors before they affect the users. This is a lot!” notes Tirkkonen.
The adoption of DevOps can benefit employers by making it easier to retain employees with a modern way of working in a supportive and automated environment. It can also help to attract and retain the best talents who are always looking for innovative and exciting challenges.
Struggling to hide his passion for the DevOps culture, Tirkkonen concludes by saying: “When efficiency is increased and manual tasks are removed, developers and others can focus on producing value, by being innovative and continuously improving products and services.”
Tapani has over 30 years of experience in the IT sector, from software development to consulting, working both in development and management positions. Currently, he works as Modernization Advisor, helping to adopt DevOps practices. Tapani is a certified Scrum Master and TOGAF 9.1 Enterprise Architect.