The digital market is evolving quickly, and you can become a part of that transition if you keep pace with the tech trends. One of such innovations is DevOps – an innovative set of tools and methods for process optimization and automation. Using the DevOps toolkit, you can achieve sizable cross-team communication improvements, continuous product releases, and greater resiliency. Thus, considering DevOps is vital for every forward-looking business.
However, many companies starting a DevOps transition face challenges of choice and implementation. They need DevOps assessment services to get a clear breakdown of steps, tools, and procedures on the way to a successful DevOps introduction. This article examines how DevOps consulting can assist you in the planning and realization of DevOps use.
DevOps Consulting Aspects
Once you decide to integrate DevOps into your business processes, the roadmap may seem unclear and overwhelming. In this case, you need to contact a consulting agency to seek advice and support in planning. Here are the main strategic aspects on which you can get competent external consulting.
#1 CI/CD Integration
Continuous delivery, integration, and deployment solutions are vital for any software provider. They ensure seamless integration of dev processes across multiple platforms, such as Docker and Jenkins, and ensure continuous delivery (CD) with Kubernetes, Docker, Hybrid, etc. Continuous integration (CI) ensures that no bugs emerge during code merging, giving companies a much safer and more stable environment for software upgrades and code integration.
#2 DevOps Monitoring
The DevOps-enhanced monitoring tools are meant to ensure continuous delivery with minimal error risks. Besides, they make microservices applications visible and enable sophisticated data analytics with AI and ML solutions.
#3 Big Data and Data Science Solutions
DevOps consulting firms can help you apply the functionality of Docker and Kubernetes for machine learning and deep learning integration, thus enabling top-notch data analytics and helping you use data science. These tools are also valuable in remote infrastructure management and cloud migration. You can apply them for setting up an effective data backup and disaster recovery of your databases.
Consulting on the DevOps Integration Process
Now that you have clarified the improvement aspects that DevOps can bring to your business, it’s time to develop a plan with steps and milestones. It will take you from point A (the current business situation) to point B (a company with a DevOps mindset) without friction.
#1 The DevOps Initiative
Any change starts with an idea. Thus, the first step you need to make is to offer the DevOps initiative as an idea for business improvement. As a rule, this initiative is introduced by the company’s CIO, advocating the change and justifying its implementation time and financial expenditures.
To make the change happen, your company needs to know what DevOps is. Thus, creating an educational program for the team is vital, familiarizing the staff with key steps of the DevOps development cycle and the expected organizational impact.
#2 Strategizing
After making a case for the DevOps introduction, you need to proceed to workable steps on the way to this goal. This is where the DevOps consulting agency can be of much help. You can ask it to assess your company’s competencies and develop a workable plan with the parameters of collaboration, process acceleration, reliability, scalability, security, and deliverability.
Don’t forget that the core task of DevOps is to improve cross-team collaboration. Thus, you must design the change process with partnership in mind, bringing your dev and ops teams together.
#3 Containerization of Processes
Process containerization is the secret weapon of DevOps in process optimization and quality gains. It improves collaboration between all parts of the software development team, enabling them to work on the same code in different applications. The parts of code on which one person works are isolated from the shared operating system so that the changes don’t get chaotic. Once the process is over, the piece of code is brought back to the shared environment for further work.
Using containers is highly beneficial for the operations team, as they can manage the entire product better. There is no need to rebuild the whole product and check how the updated parts fine-tune with the rest of the code because of all changes taking place in containers.
#4 CI/CD Automation
CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous delivery) are part and parcel of efficient automation that DevOps brings. The CI/CD pipeline includes a set of processes through which a product passes before its launch. The trick about CI/CD tools is that each process in the pipeline can be done manually, but using DevOps enables their full-scale automation. Thus, using CI/CD pipelines designed in line with the DevOps principle ensures quicker software delivery and app development.
#5 Automated Testing Environment
Automated testing is the key to rapid and robust software development and deployment of different kinds of software. It enables rigorous code checks once the new code is ready, thus helping coders to complete the code review process incrementally. This approach removes the need to conduct cumbersome code checks at the end of software development, introducing checks throughout the development pathway.
The basic principles of DevOps integration in the testing aspect include the use of smoke tests, setting up the testing environment with remote machines, running the QA tests together with CI/CD pipeline integration, and daily checks of testing results.
Assess the Change with DevOps Parameters
The core characteristic of DevOps is ‘continuous,’ which applies to all process optimizations and changes taking place within your software development pipeline. So, you can conclude that the DevOps change has taken place in your agency if the development, testing, integration, delivery, deployment, and monitoring processes become genuinely continuous.
