DevOps As A Culture: The Mindset

devops culture principles

Overview of DevOps

DevOps refers to a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to enhance software quality by shortening the development cycle. DevOps provides better collaboration between software development and IT operations. Such a collaborative process better enables the identification of the Key Performance Indicators(KPI) to improve the quality of the software development process. The ultimate aim of DevOps is to deliver high-quality applications to your customers and minimize downtime.

DevOps as a Culture

Any enterprise whether small, medium, or large needs to align its operations with its mission and vision. As far as an enterprise is concerned, business culture is a mindset that spans across the organization. The various cross-functional teams and departments strive their best to uphold that culture in its true spirit. DevOps is neither a tool nor a technology. It is a culture centered around a set of practices like collaboration, automation, continuous learning, etc. In DevOps culture, many cross-functional teams come together and strive together for a common set of goals. Thus the DevOps culture breaks down the barriers that existed among the teams in the traditional approach based on the siloed structure. DevOps eliminates the blame game that is typical of a siloed structure. All the teams like development, operations, QA, and testing work hand in glove towards delivering high-quality products to their customers.

1) DevOps Culture Breaks the Silos and Fosters a Collaborative Environment

DevOps breaks the conventional siloed structure that was prevalent in the traditional IT development environments and workflows. In the traditional software development methodologies, the teams worked independently of each other thus retarding the information handoff from one team to another. DevOps integrates development and operations teams to act as a unified team. Having a unified team for development and operations can foster better communication, collaboration, and feedback among the various cross-functional teams thus facilitating teams to quickly identify the inefficient processes, and development cycle bottlenecks, take corrective and timely actions, and above all align towards a common set of goals and processes. Collaboration technologies such as Slack, Jira, Bitrix, etc facilitate the development and operations teams to efficiently cooperate and collaborate.

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According to Oji Udezue, information handoff is the most complicated part of software development and in DevOps culture, the transfer of projects from one team to another is the best way to ensure the quality of development and deployment. It is also vital for feedback, especially when it comes to incident management.

2) DevOps Culture Emphasizes Continuous Improvement

DevOps emphasizes continuous improvement, like continuous integration and continuous deployment/delivery (CI/CD), continuous learning, continuous monitoring, etc. DevOps emphasizes the conceptualization of ‘continuous everything. Continuous improvement paves the way to better cost optimization and performance, speedy and time-bound deployment of applications, and faster troubleshooting of bugs and other glitches. All the agile practices emphasize continuous improvement. A good approach to continuous improvement enables enterprises to pave the way to better quality assurance (QA). As opposed to the traditional approach, DevOps places equal and shared accountability on both development and operations teams from the very outset of the development process.

3) DevOps Emphasizes Automation

Automation is at the core of the DevOps culture. As per statistics automation provides a stable environment that can drastically bring down IT failures. Automation focuses on repetitive, error-prone tasks that could significantly consume a major portion of the development cycle. It also focuses on minimizing the human intervention required and eliminating bugs and errors. Automation increases the overall efficiency and productivity by focusing on creating a faster and more efficient development cycle. Not only does the development cycle become efficient and productive, but it also enables the team to focus on the underlying application rather than break their head with repetitive and error-prone tasks
To accelerate the software development life cycle and strive for continuous improvement and immediately reach out to your customers, it is of utmost importance to automate your processes. Several automation tools help you in streamlining the process flow through the DevOps pipeline. The most commonly used tools include Puppet, Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Bamboo, OpenStack, Ansible, Chef, Vagrant, Selenium, etc.

4) DevOps Culture Considers Failure as a Part and Parcel

As far as DevOps strategy is concerned it is okay to fail. DevOps emphasizes failing small as compared to the traditional approach which emphasizes completely doing away with failure as part of its risk aversion strategy. But when the traditional approach fails it often fails largely. DevOps strategy which considers failures as a part and parcel, emphasizes the teams to collectively act on the small failures thus paving the way to better success. DevOps culture emphasizes iterating over and over again to pave the way to continuous improvement.

5) DevOps Culture Focuses on the Needs of the Customer to Enhance Customer Success

DevOps emphasizes enhancing the value of services by offering high-quality software to the customers and that too within the minimum time frame. DevOps enables teams to identify the issues at the start of the development stage itself, unlike the conventional development models where issues and glitches are identified after the deployment and the delivery stage thus requiring enterprises to recall them back. The ability to identify the issues well in advance enables the teams to develop products that are devoid of any bugs and glitches. This enhances the customer experience and customer satisfaction thus helping you to build a loyal customer base.

According to Aruna Ravichandran, If digital transformation is the endgame in meeting customer requirements and growing the business, DevOps is the vehicle that allows you to get there.

6) Processes

DevOps emphasizes achieving an efficient and secure set of operational processes. DevOps culture involves processes that fail fast and small but ultimately lead to success as teams iterate back and forth on those processes to get as many data points, unlike the traditional approach that fails big. DevOps emphasizes selecting the right combination of tools, technologies, and processes that best aligns with your common set of goals and objectives by bringing all the concerned teams and stakeholders on the same page.

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Conclusion

DevOps is a culture that has to be embraced if you want to see yourself as a part of the competition. You can start small with DevOps by identifying a process and recreating it in the DevOps manner. Once you can experience the benefits of DevOps in action you can indeed make a full-fledged dive into the DevOps culture.

Activelobby assists you in creating a better road map for your products and services. We have a well-established 24-by-7 DevOps consulting services team. Activelobby has a full-fledged DevOps culture for the application development process and we ensure a hundred percent automation of our software development lifecycle thus ensuring minimum downtime. Our DevOps processes also adhere to the DevSecOps standards, which ensure end-to-end security of our applications thus providing better protection from potential threats and vulnerabilities.
With Activelobby’s DevOps consulting services you increase your infrastructure agility, shorten your releases, improve scalability and reliability and thus ultimately deliver quality software applications for your customers.

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Rohith Krishnan

Rohith SK is an MSC computer science graduate living in Cochin, Kerala. As a technology enthusiast, he is always on the lookout for the latest trends and developments in the field, with a particular interest in cloud computing and DevOps updates. Apart from his passion for technology, Rohith SK is an avid reader and enjoys spending his free time exploring different genres of literature. He believes that reading is one of the best ways to expand one's knowledge and understanding of the world. With his expertise in computer science and a passion for technology, Rohith SK regularly contributes articles and blog posts on the latest trends and updates in the industry. His articles offer insights and valuable perspectives on the various aspects of cloud computing and DevOps, and are widely read and appreciated by readers all over the world. As an experienced technology writer and researcher, Rohith SK's articles are well-researched, informative, and easy to understand, making them accessible to readers of all levels of technical knowledge. Whether you're a beginner looking to learn more about the latest trends in technology, or an experienced professional seeking insights and updates, Rohith's articles are sure to provide valuable information and insights.

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