DevOps Misunderstandings and how DevOps Really Drives Business Needs
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By A Website Design |
Ever since Patrick Debois coined the term "DevOps" to the IT world and called for the inaugural DevOps Days event, there has been no doubt that DevOps has shifted from a buzzword to a movement of global proportions.
Embracing DevOps has been driven by such factors as:
- An ever increasing rate of production releases requested by business unit stakeholders
- The utilization of agile and other development processes and methodologies
- The rising usage of data center automation and tools for configuration management
- The comprehensive availability of cloud infrastructure in a virtualized environment from both internal and external providers
You will always have pessimists and optimists, the naysayers and the champions. The detractors proclaim that DevOps is just a moniker for Sys Admin while Techno Snobs claim that the term is just some attempt by delirious devs to rid themselves of dealing with operations. There are even ops developer wanna-bes that support DevOps to be better liked and respected.
Pretty much since the term DevOps has been introduced into the IT world, some companies have pushed back at the ideas DevOps has spawned. This is due more from misunderstanding, rather than what the core of term truly represents.
Put it this way. DevOps is not an issue essentially about technology, but at its core it is inextricably linked to the demands of business.
DevOps is not Independent: DevOps Needs To Empower Businesses
What is the ultimate goal of a business? It is to make money. How do you get from point A to point B? You must have a process in place that takes the idea and puts it into motion to eventually become a product you can sell.Take a look at the business process as an avenue where all the different IT roles, drive towards the same goal. Making money. Every IT resource , from developers to configuration managers to operations is working towards that goal.
If you remove the business process from the equation, then you have teams acting like bumper cars at an amusement park, all doing their own thing without connecting and communicating towards the business process goal.
Absent of a business process, puts teams in limbo. They go through the motions and ultimately the business side of the house, won't see any value in employing these teams.
The primary goal of DevOps is to empower businesses to become reactive to the changing forces of the market in order to be as competitive as possible, and to ultimately outdo their competition. Businesses want and need to have this process in place, moving as deftly and thoroughly as possible to ensure that they stayin business. First and foremost is that without this a close link to the business process, there is no reason to discuss the benefits that DevOps offers, and less so to discuss how to solve the challenges that DevOps is meant to address.
DevOps Is More Than Just Cutting Edge Tools: DevOps is Really About Processes
Cutting edge tools empower organizations to make their business process more efficient, flexible and dependable. But this can only be achieved by the tools working in smooth unison. When tools do not work together in such a fashion, they remain just tools, outside a process.
Tools are not the "holy grail" of DevOps and will most probably not solve all your problems. DevOps is more than just using cool tools. Such issues as cost and performance are two very obvious key issues. Scalability is another.
Organizations typically end up using new tools to support previous bad habits and broken processes. Since tools can only achieve improvements for the organization according to their integration, it is the goal of the business process that will reinforces and specifies the reasons for and how best to use the tool.
When it becomes obvious to organizations as to what the exact problems are regarding the DevOps process, and what needs to happen in order to fix those problems, the tools discussion will present itself in a clearer manner.
Taking into account that DevOps is still young and made up of mostly tech people, it is clear why there is so much excitement when it comes to discussing tools. Most importantly, it is paramount for all involved to understand the reason for selecting specific tools, only after they have clarified the desired goals of the business process improvements
DevOps isn't Simply Agile: DevOps Improves Communication over Development Lifecycle
The goals of both the DevOps and Agile processes are essentially the same, but they are fundamentally different entities. You can be an IT manager whose team succeeds at Agile Development, deploy 30 releases a day, but still have lots of DevOps issues. On the other hand, an organization could be great at removing many of the issues DevOps presents and not utilize Agile methodologies at all (but becoming more unlikely).
Agile and DevOps can be described as being related concepts, spawned out of the idea of being as lean as possible andgetting rid of wasteful resources, making both highly streamlined processes. However, the two processes work on different plains. The goal of Agile is to delve deep into improving the important IT function of delivering software. DevOps on the other hand, is about improving the communication throughout the entire development life cycle; from concept to production.
DevOps is About Improving Deployments and That Makes Business Happy
The main issue in early dialogue regarding DevOps, was that organizations did not immediately understand the magnitude as to why DevOps is called DevOps, if it is about business. DevOps was created to answer one of the biggest issues in all of business: How to empower businesses to counter the changes in the market as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Like the growth of any idea, the conversation needed to begin somewhere, so it moved toward a problem of almost universal proportions. How do we resolve the hassles and miscommunication between two very different cultures - Development and Operations?. Of course, there are no two organizationas that are the same. However, it is pretty simple to present the division between the two like this. On the one side you have the creative development camp of the house. There is a wall of confusion, that stands between development and operations, preventing a clear path to the business goal. This is the obstacle that DevOps seeks to overcome, to smooth the path from development to operations and ultimately supporting the business.
The early days of DevOps was about easing the path to deployment because change is a primary element that runs throughout the IT organization. That was a rational way to start. Its natural progression has come to embody a process that empowers organizations to break through that wall of confusion, and bridge the gap between Development and Operations.
