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Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective USE CASE
1Use Case: Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
U S E C A S E
2Use Case: Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
Introduction
Define and… conquer your ‘epics’
Stay within the tools (always)
Ready for a run?
Let’s meet (up)
Meet your tools
In a nutshell
Contact info
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Contents
3Use Case: Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
Since DevOps is not a software or a technology that you can
implement or adopt, one might wonder “How exactly am I going to
leverage this?”
The answer is extremely simple: Hire an expert! Well… you will
do that, of course, but you still need to understand what the
complete picture looks like from a user’s perspective.
Starting a DevOps infrastructure in your organization needs a cultural change. This
means that you first have to tackle the human factor, since DevOps is all about
collaboration, feedback and continuous improvement. So, make sure that everyone
is on-board on the following ‘fully mandatory’ principles:
· Teams (developers and operations, along with designers, marketing and others)
need to collaborate with each other at all times. Anyone refusing to do this has to
be reassigned.
· Tool usage is not just mandatory, it is absolutely essential for the success of all
your applications and services. DevOps automates tasks, so completing forms and
fields correctly is a must.
· Encourage everybody to be honest about time estimations and feedback. DevOps
is not about making people type faster. It is about knowing exactly how they type.
After establishing a reality status, you will be able to predict and optimize.
· Try not to be too harsh on those that fail to deliver (proper code, configuration or
deployment, for example) during the first few weeks, but be extremely rigid when it
comes to following the established rules and procedures.
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Define and… conquer your ‘epics’
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Your first DevOps project will start with what we call an “epic”. This is the big picture, your first ultimate goal. Make sure to have all your great minds in the room when trying to establish this goal. All teams should be represented as well.
Furthermore, make the goal a bit wide. You shouldn’t put something like “a new design for my Website”, but an objective like “improve customer experience”. One component of this improved experience, would be your new Website – but there will be others as well.
This means that you have to break your epic, down to little pieces, usually known as “stories”. The new Website, along with an easier to use call center are two stories under the same epix.
Use Case: Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
5Use Case: Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
After establishing your goal, you should start defining this goal within the DevTools… tools. No exceptions. DevOps members live and breath inside Jira or Azure Boards for example. There is simply no other way around it. Not if you want to be an agile enterprise, delivering faster, securely and with higher quality than the competition.
The same tools will help you provide feedback, connect the task with the actual code, your code with the repository, then the runtime and the artifact, all the way to your deployment server.
Stay within the tools (always)
Ready for a run?
Probably the best-known word within the DevOps team, is “sprint”. Every task needs to be done in a sprint. Sprints are tight, usually no more than 2 weeks (they come in “sizes”), and they are the secret weapon of continuous delivery. You don’t need to loose hours on a problem, you just backlog it in order for the team to examine it (during the next sprint), and you move on delivering your viable “product”.
Sprints are essential for keeping everyone at pace, and they help you understand what your team can do and what not.
After a few runs, you will be able to determine your team’s capacity with considerable accuracy, thus allowing you to plan your next projects with confident. For the first time in years, delivering on-time, on-specs and on-budget will be a reality for your managers.
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Let’s meet (up) Meet your tools
Collaboration means… meetings, right? Well, no, not exactly. DevOps members do need to meet on a daily basis, but this is done extremely quickly. Usually 5 minutes are enough, just to understand were the project stands. In fact, most of the times these meetings are done so quickly over morning coffee, that we call them “stand ups” (defined by the Scrum methodology but “borrowed” by other approaches as well).
From a user’s view, DevOps is a set of software tools. Developers -of course- are also writing code (someone has to deliver the actual deliverable, right?), but even them, are using the set of tools, provided by the DevOps infrastructure in place.
Planning tools include Jira and Azure Boards (a revolutionary tool launched a year ago along with the complete Azure DevOps stack from Microsoft). When something goes wrong, you don’t put it on your (or anyone else’s) to do list. You backlog it for the next sprint.
Development tools can include pretty much everything (Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code are great solutions), and your CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) is driven by Azure Pipelines. GitHub can be used for your code repositories and version control, while your latest code is built and prepared (in a LINT fashion) by tools like Jenkins that deliver the so-called “artifact”.
After that, all you need is usually a container that will be deployed to individual hosts (e.g. Docker) or through the quite popular Kubernetes.
Configuration management tools (the ones making sure you have a server ready for deployment, exactly as you need it to be), include Puppet and Chef.
Use Case: Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
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DevOps automate software development on a vast scale, allowing continuous
optimization and delivery. Users “live and breathe” inside the various DevOps
tools, which are now more integrated than ever among them, thanks to Azure
DevOps launch.
With the help of a trusted IT partner, you can implement a DevOps approach
to your organization, reaping unique benefits and allowing your company to be
always a step (or two) ahead of the competition.
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In a nutshell
8Use Case: Enabling DevOps – a User’s Perspective
About InfopulseInfopulse, part of Nordic IT group EVRY A/S, is an international vendor of services in the areas of Software R&D, Application Management, Cloud & IT Operations, and Cybersecurity to SMEs and Fortune 100 companies across the globe. Founded in 1991, the company has a team of over 2,000 professionals and is represented in 11 countries across Europe and North America. Infopulse is trusted by many established brands, such as BICS, Bosch, British American Tobacco, Citrix, Credit Agricole, ING Bank, Gorenje, METRO Cash & Carry, Microsoft, Mondelēz, OTP Bank, Raiffeisen Bank Aval, SAP, UkrSibbank BNP Paribas Group, VEON, Vodafone, and others. For more information, please visit www.infopulse.com
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