Aligning Developers with a DevOps Cloud Strategy

Is rapid application development important to your software factory? Are you developing new products, applications, or customer experiences to drive revenue, deliver efficiencies or improve customer satisfaction?Then you need a collaborative and unified effort between the development and the operations - DevOps. When it comes to product and application teams, DevOps is more than a tool or a technology. It is a culture that guides teams and organizations. However, without laying organizational cultural foundations, enterprises often face challenges during DevOps transformation. If you find yourself in this situation, then your business needs to consider development of the DevOps Cloud Strategy to enhance performance, functionality, data integrity, and security.

In this post, we explore essential steps that organizations should consider during implementation of the DevOps Cloud strategy.

Step 1: Defining the DevOps Culture

Everything starts with selecting a cloud vendor. Once a partner is selected, leaders and their teams often come together to determine how best to operate a new environment. This is the beginning of a DevOps cloud strategy. This strategy often includes the overall governance, architecture, security, practices, operational procedures, and responsibilities on managing the cloud environment.

Operationally, it often starts with specifying how accounts are configured, environments structured, security enabled, redundancy configured, and access enabled. It also factors in how costs will be monitored and allocated to consumers. In other words, a DevOps cloud strategy often starts with governance, architecture, and practices similar to how traditional infrastructure is configured.

Step 2: Aligning DevOps with Development and Operations

You can’t ignore execution when defining any strategy and that’s where things become interesting for a DevOps cloud strategy. Most of the execution can be automated and so leaders and teams immediately jump into the debate over what tools should be used, what methodologies to standardize on, what areas of automation to focus on, and most importantly, whose responsibility it is to implement the automation.

Developing this strategy can often lead to debate within the IT organization especially when developers and engineers are asked to get involved in formulating it. They are coming at it from their traditional responsibilities and principles at a time when IT is being asked to do more with less. In fact, the trend is toward leaner, faster software development teams especially as organizations look to microservices architectures to accelerate their application portfolios.

If this is happening in your organization, it’s an opportunity to take a step back and realign everyone’s mission.

It is time to breakdown the traditional silos of development and operational responsibilities and beginthinking through how best to collaborate in a smarter faster world. This doesn’t necessarily mean a departmental reorganization, but should go into realigning disciplines, objectives and responsibilities.  Once operating principles are laid out, a strategic team – or a Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) – should work collaboratively to propose an execution plan. The table below is a suggested starting point.

Step 3: Execution

Teams that work on execution collaboratively often reach a common conclusion, specifically, that the traditional charter for developers and operations hasn’t changed much, but the technologies have.

Regardless of how the organization elects to assign responsibilities and priorities, there are new tools to learn that require a stronger collaboration between those that build applications and those that ensure they are performing.

For developers, it is important align them with their primary mission of developing products, applications, and experiences. If they are focused on this mission, they should elect to partner and collaborate with others on the team and with service providers on executing the DevOps strategy.

Making the Most of Enterprise DevOps

A managed DevOps toolchain is the smarter solution for automating software development and delivery:

• Unified, Collaborative CI/CD ToolChain: We integrate configure and manage your favourite tools-as-a-service into one flexible toolchain to simplify and streamline development processes.
• DevOps Consulting Service: Our DevOps experts are here to understand your DevOps and business objectives so we can help make recommendations and implement changes to get you to the end goal quicker. We can also accelerate your team’s onboarding by providing DevOps toolchain and processes best practices.
• Overcome Resource Complexity and Challenges: Spend more time on your core business and rely on experts for your DevOps initiatives. We offer a turnkey toolchain-as-a-service as well as DevOps-as-a-service to be an extension of your DevOps team.