How do you develop a DevOps strategy?

DevOps strategy is developed in order to enhance customer’s experience by providing value-driven products through the strategic application of automation, collaboration, and agile methods. The benefits that can be derived by organizations through the adoption of DevOps strategies are rapid code deployment, faster delivery, reduced time to market, and better productivity and teamwork. In this article, you will know about the five key steps that are required to develop a viable DevOps strategy.   

Following are the five key steps that are needed to develop a DevOps strategy:

1. Think as to how DevOps processes can be streamlined: Following are three key factors that play a pivotal role in streamlining DevOps processes:

• Strategic separation of environments: Separation of environments into development/testing/staging/production is the first step for DevOps transformation. 

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• Agile development: More environments are required for cross-functional teams and rapid delivery. To keep up with the agile model, automation activity needs to be increased and a ‘silo’ culture needs to be sidelined.

• Continuous Integration (CI): New code is automatically built, tested, and integrated into a common repository by developers using the CI platform. Merge conflicts can be resolved by version control. 

• Continuous Delivery (CD): It is built upon CI and allows code to be deployed to staging/production environment with least or no manual intervention. Troubleshooting is simplified when releasing takes place as often as possible.

2. Select the best DevOps tools: To select the right DevOps tools, tech stacks, and requirements along with the choice of cloud provider needs to be considered. If there is a multi-cloud setup, then those tools need to be selected that can work with all providers. Those tools that have been selected should also support the IT/network resources that play a key role in managing connections between the microservices. The tools should be connected to the cloud provider’s security, governance, and monitoring features.

3. The prominence of test automation: Identifying bugs in the early stages of the software development process saves time and cost to a great extent. To make DevOps transformation a success, test automation plays a pivotal role. The amount of routine work required for a newly deployed code to be tested is greatly reduced and thus the time that is saved is spent more on in-depth exploratory testing.

From a DevOps perspective, test automation checks monitoring, governance, security, and other related services. Large amounts of realistic data are generated for further manual testing. Every time developers commit a change to the code, the running of regression/integration/unit tests takes place. 

4. Rethink about organizational barriers: There are many organizations that resist changes in the organizational objectives. On the contrary, a DevOps culture promotes innovation and constant change. Building the right type of products requires constant innovation and learning from failures. Internal processes and business structure needs to be modified or changed as and when required.

5. Start developing a strategic DevOps structure: DevOps workflows need to be properly understood by the concerned teams in order to handle issues smartly through the DevOps platform. If there are any major issues at the coding stage, then CI version control can be used. Similarly, if there is an issue with the infrastructure and deployment, then Continuous Delivery can be aptly implemented. People, processes, and technologies should be properly integrated with DevOps in order to build great products.