Category: DevOps
Slow and Steady don’t win races – Neither Formula 1 nor DevOps
Taking into account the pace at which innovation happens and technologies evolve in today’s world, software development is no less than an F1 race. Precision is critical, but speed can’t be forfeited either.
A lot more goes into the F1 racing strategy than meets the eye. There is no denying the skill of the drivers who battle it out on the tracks, but it takes an entire team to plan and execute a winning strategy. From designing the vehicle and its aerodynamics to deciding how much fuel to start with, or in which lap to refuel or change tires, and everything in between is critical to ensuring success. Similarly, success of the DevOps approach to software development and delivery rests on the premise of collaboration between stakeholders to accelerate the release of new software, while ensuring quality and optimizing costs. Delays can translate into lost business opportunities and jeopardize your competitive advantage. The key is to focus on continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery to ensure quality, reliability and speed.
Customer found defects – Everybody’s embarrassment, nobody’s fault
How to overcome the Build vs. Buy dilemma for CI/CD pipeline monitoring
While DevOps has provided a middle path to the warring development and operations tribes in most organizations, it requires a high level of expertise to champion CI/CD processes and achieve continuous improvements. Organizations often struggle to harness the true value of their CI/CD implementation. Though CI/CD pipeline monitoring can help in assessing the health and performance of pipelines, selecting the right tool for monitoring isn’t simple. They also face the quintessential build vs. buy dilemma in the selection of CI/CD monitoring tools. Like always, it’s not just about time and material; they also need to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO), along with the opportunity costs due to engagement of their resources in configuration and maintenance, instead of real work.
Let’s explore what it takes to monitor a CI/CD pipeline with and without a commercial monitoring solution.
Top 5 compliance challenges in DevOps
One of the primary goals of DevOps is to improve speed and reliability with a higher cross-functional collaboration and to make security, quality, and feedback parts of the pipeline. With automation and shift left approaches, most organizations have varying levels of success in meeting this goal. However, compliance controls and audit activities still involve a lot of manual workflows, which makes them inefficient and error-prone. In this article, we will explore the major challenges and possible solutions for implementing continuous compliance in DevOps.
Transforming IT operations with site reliability engineering
Observability – Here’s all you need to know
Measuring DevOps success with DORA metrics
In the software development world, the benefits of DevOps in terms of improving velocity, reliability, and shared ownership among all stakeholders are well documented and established. Approaches such as those described under the CAMS model (Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing), help organizations define their DevOps strategy. Following such approaches, many organizations have transformed their software development practices, improving the culture and technology elements. Still, DevOps implementations can differ significantly due to varying business, development, and compliance objectives. Further, different organizations, or at times even dispersed teams in the same organization, end up using different proprietary and open-source DevOps toolchains. Due to these variations, organizations often lack a standard to measure the success of their DevOps implementations. Eventually, measuring the success of DevOps implementations becomes a big question mark with no definite answers.
Needless to say, measurement is the secret sauce for the success of any business process. And, in the absence of a unified view of performance indicators or metrics across the DevOps lifecycle, gauging the health and progress of DevOps implementations becomes near impossible. By continuous tracking of DevOps metrics, teams can make small improvements to achieve large gains over a period. Further, DevOps metrics can help organizations get early warnings to make course corrections, prevent large scale failures, and avoid reputational and commercial losses. However, the world of metrics is ‘highly populated,’ and the information overload can make it difficult for delivery leaders to get actionable insights, quickly. Identifying which metrics are most critical, and how to analyze them isn’t straightforward. This is where DORA metrics offer a way forward to organizations.