Running an IT firm is not easy. Sometimes, your development team might delay production and other times, your operations team may not work as efficiently. If the issues do not resolve even after discussing them numerous times, what to do?
The answer is: DevOps!
Experienced DevOps experts can improve team collaboration and ensure smooth functionality to facilitate production and support business growth.
This article shares proven expert strategies to help you scale your business with DevOps effortlessly. But first, what does DevOps do?
What is the Role of DevOps?
DevOps facilitates team collaboration between Dev (development) and Ops (operations) within the organization to expedite the development and deployment of high-quality software solutions. It focuses on a customer-first approach by avoiding silos and resolving performance issues.
How to Scale Your Business with DevOps?
As a business grows, the number of teams within the company often also increases, often negatively impacting collaboration between them. DevOps makes it easier to reduce delays by automating processes and supporting communication. DevOps strategies and tools help achieve the desired goals swiftly.
Some of the most important strategies endorsed by DevOps experts to improve operational excellence and speed within your organization include the following.
Design Personalized DevOps Goals for Your Company
While the role and responsibility of DevOps consulting in different companies may be similar, the end goals may not always be the same. Some may require a comprehensive DevOps implementation, whereas others may already be practicing cloud compounding, security automation, etc., and looking to focus on team communication. Thus, it is important to analyze your company’s current functions and workflows and decide on clear, personalized goals for DevOps.
For example, in the next six months, do you want to:
- Boost productivity by 20%
- Eliminate communication barriers between teams
- Automate specific processes
Developing a strategy specific to your business’s needs will help everyone understand its potential impact on business outcomes, eliminating ambiguity among team members and stakeholders. It is even better to create SMART goals to efficiently track success metrics after implementing DevOps.
Create a Dependable DevOps Team
Silos are among the most common reasons for the need for DevOps experts in an organization. When teams are disconnected and fail to timely inform each other of issues, it can lead to deployment delays and harm the company’s reputation. DevOps helps avoid silos by bridging the communication gap between different teams.
A cross-functional DevOps team comprising individuals from departments (development, operations, security) ensures effective communication across the company. Thus, you must either hire an experienced, top-of-the-line team for DevOps to provide DevOps training to your star employees. Make sure that the team lead is well-informed about DevOps best practices, proficient in operating DevOps tools, and able to communicate effectively for the best results.
Automation
When you have set clear goals and put together a stellar team, it’s time to start implementing DevOps strategies and practices into your business. Automation is the most fundamental element of DevOps, improving workflows and operational excellence within the company while also enabling scalability. Automating repetitive tasks, such as compiling code, testing, and packaging, allows you to engage your resources more productively and eventually improve results.
You can automate processes with cloud computing, IaC (Infrastructure as Code), CI/CD adoption, and security automation to ensure consistency and reduce errors.
CI/ CD Pipelines
CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous delivery) enable teams to integrate, test, and deliver software to users quickly eliminating manual effort and reducing human errors. It supports developers in integrating new features and deploying updates faster. It not only allows you to boost production, but also enables your team to focus on designing innovative solutions by accelerating production and testing. CI/CD streamlines processes and ensures instant feedback to prevent issues during deployment.
Tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, and Travis CI are used for continuous integration, whereas Spinnaker, Octopus Deploy, and Harness help with continuous delivery/ deployment. At the same time, AWS CodePipeline, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, and Google Cloud Build combine CI and CD into unified pipelines.
IaC
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) makes it incredibly easy and efficient to automate processes when implementing DevOps. It automates deployments by running code, saving you the hassle of managing changes and modifications manually. Tools like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Ansible, and Helm allow your infrastructure to act as code, enabling your development teams to focus on innovation instead of performing recurring processes.
Communication and Collaboration
Communication and collaboration between teams are core elements of DevOps consulting, helping organizations function better by removing silos. DevOps encourages teams to share information and communicate transparently throughout the process to create high-performing software solutions faster. Other than promoting cross-team collaboration, DevOps experts also encourage shared ownership while emphasizing everyone’s unique role in the process.
Monitoring and Feedback
You may have done everything for seamless DevOps integration, and the teams have also familiarized themselves with the new practices, but how do you ensure success?
DevOps is an ongoing process; you will need to measure outcomes and improve the processes continuously for operational excellence. Besides SMART goals, continuous monitoring, integrated tracking, and honest feedback enable the organization to identify loopholes and seek adequate solutions to avoid lagging proactively. It may also include feedback from investors, users, and other stakeholders to ensure seamless functioning.
You can gather user feedback by encouraging employees from non-technical departments to try the website or app. User experience discussion forums and surveys can help identify issues that require immediate attention. Moreover, defining KPIs will help you measure the results efficiently and plan ahead accordingly.
Checklist of potential KPIs for DevOps implementation:
- Deployment frequency
- Lead time for changes
- Mean time to recovery (MTR)
- Automated deployments vs. manual %
- Software performance
- Post-release defect rate
- Mean time between failures (MTBF)
- Number of silos broken
- Cross-team collaboration/ team satisfaction scores
- Lead time to deliver customer-requested features
- Customer-reported issues
- Revenue growth
- Cost savings
Continuous Improvement
Adopt DevSecOps
Scalability
DevOps Tools for Scaling Your Business
GitHub: GitHub allows developers to work collaboratively on code and track changes. It can also scan for vulnerabilities in the code to ensure security.
Jenkins: Jenkins is an open-source automation server used to build, test, and deploy applications. It supports hundreds of plugins and is mainly used for CI/CD.
Azure: Azure by Microsoft is an all-in-one DevOps platform that allows you to build pipelines, test programs, and support release management. You can also connect it to other tools for improved efficiency.
Ansible: It is a simple, agentless automation tool that uses YAML scripts to configure servers, deploy apps, orchestrate infrastructure, and manage thousands of machines at once.
Terrafoam: This IaC tool allows you to write infrastructure definitions in code and deploy them across cloud providers, such as GCP, Azure, AWS, etc. This makes infrastructure consistent, repeatable, and scalable.
Kubernetes: Kubernetes is an orchestration platform for managing containers and ensuring smooth app functionality. It handles load balancing, scaling, deployments, and fault tolerance automatically to facilitate scaling.
Prometheus: This open-source monitoring system for cloud-native apps collects time-series metrics and stores them. Prometheus integrates seamlessly with Kubernetes.
Jira: It is an agile project management tool used to monitor tasks, detect bugs, and automate releases by planning, tracking, and managing software development.
These are a few commonly used ones among numerous DevOps tools that boost operational excellence and help scale your business.
Final Words
DevOps has become essential to organizations stuck in a loop due to poor coordination among teams. By eliminating silos, especially between development and operations teams, DevOps experts improve team collaboration and increase production. DevOps strategies, including automation via CI/CD pipelines, IaC implementation, and security automation, followed by continuous monitoring ensure optimal results.
Get in touch with our DevOps experts to improve functioning within the company and expand your business.
