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Friday, November 27, 2015

DevOps Session 2 - Best Practices for Effective DevOps

DevOps means beyond the high-level vision of tighter and more effective collaboration between development teams and operations teams.

Here I listed the best practices which we could use for the effectively in DevOps

Practice 1: Active Stakeholder Participation

 

A fundamental philosophy of DevOps is that developers, operations staff, and support people must work closely together on a regular basis. An implication is that they must see one other as important stakeholders and actively seek to work together. A common practice within the agile community is "onsite customer," adopted from Extreme Programming (XP), which motivates agile developers to work closely with the business. Disciplined agilists take this one step further with the practice of active stakeholder participation, which says that developers should work closely with all of their stakeholders, including operations and support staff--not just business stakeholders. This is a two-way street: Operations and support staff must also be willing to work closely with developers.

Practice 2: Automated Testing

 

Agile software developers are said to be "quality infected" because of their focus on writing quality code and their desire to test as often and early as possible. As a result, automated regression testing is a common practice adopted by agile teams, which is sometimes extended to test-first approaches such as test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD). Because agile teams commonly run their automated test suites many times a day, and because they fix any problems they find right away, they enjoy higher levels of quality than teams that don't. This is good news for operations staff that insists a solution must be of sufficient quality before approving its release into production.

Practice 3: Integrated Configuration Management 

 

With an integrated approach to configuration management (CM), development teams not only apply CM at the solution level as is customary, they also consider production configuration issues between their solution and the rest of your organization's infrastructure. This can be a major change for some developers because they're often used to thinking about CM only in terms of the solution they are currently working on. 

In a DevOps environment, developers need to be enterprise-aware and look at the bigger picture. How will their solution work with and take advantage of other assets in production? Will other assets leverage the solution being developed? The implication is that development teams will need to understand, and manage, the full range of dependencies for their product. Integrated configuration management enables operations staff to understand the potential impact of a new release, thereby making it easy to decide when to allow the new release to occur.

Practice 4: Integrated Change Management

 

From an IT perspective, change management is the act of ensuring successful and meaningful evolution of the IT infrastructure to better support the overall organization. This is tricky enough at a project-team level because many technologies, and even versions of similar technologies, will be used in the development of a single solution. Because DevOps brings the enterprise-level issues associated with operations into the mix, an integrated change management strategy can be far more complex, due to the need to consider a large number of solutions running and interacting in production simultaneously. With integrated change management, development teams must work closely with operations teams to understand the implications of any technology changes at an organization level. This approach depends on the earlier practices of active stakeholder participation, integrated configuration management, and automated testing.

Practice 5: Continuous Integration

 

Continuous integration (CI) is the discipline of building and validating a project, through automated regression testing and sometimes code analysis whenever updated code is checked into the version control system. CI is one of the sexier agile development practices (at least from a developer's perspective) that is typically associated with DevOps. CI enables developers to develop a high-quality working solution safely in small, regular steps by providing immediate feedback on code defects.

Practice 6: Integrated Deployment Planning

 

From the point of view of development teams, deployment planning has always required interaction with an organization's operations staff; in some cases, via liaison specialists within operations typically called release engineers. Experienced development teams will do such planning continuously throughout construction with active stakeholder participation from development, operations, and support groups. When you adopt a DevOps strategy, you quickly realize the need to take a cross-team approach to deployment planning due to the need for operations staff to work with all of your development teams. This isn't news to operations staff, but it can be a surprise to development teams accustomed to working in their own siloed environments. If your team is not doing this already, you will need to start vying for release slots in the overall organizational deployment schedule. Furthermore, to support continuous deployment, release engineers will need to increase the number of release slots available to agile teams that are disciplined enough to continuously and consistently meet the quality requirements for release.

Practice 7: Continuous Deployment

 

Continuous deployment extends the practice of continuous integration. With continuous deployment, when your integration is successful in one sandbox, your changes are automatically promoted to the next sandbox, and integration is automatically started there. This automatic promotion continues until the point where any changes must be verified by a person, typically at the transition point between development and operations. 

Continuous deployment enables development teams to reduce the time between a new feature being identified and being deployed into production. It enables the business to be more responsive. However, continuous deployment increases operational risk by increasing the potential for defects to be introduced into production when development teams aren't sufficiently disciplined. Successful continuous deployment in an enterprise environment requires all the practices described earlier.

Practice 8: Production Support

 

In enterprise environments, most application development teams are working on new releases of a solution that already exists in production. Not only will they be working on the new release, they will also have the responsibility of addressing serious production problems. The development team will often be referred to as "level three support" for the application because they will be the third (and last) team to be involved with fixing critical production problems. 

Although the need to do level three production support is common, with the exception of Kanban and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), many agile methods only address this effort in passing. An important side effect of this practice is that it gives developers an appreciation of the kinds of things that occur in production, providing them with learning opportunities to improve the way that they design solutions in the first place.

Practice 9: Application Monitoring

 

As the name suggests, this is the operational practice of monitoring running solutions and applications once they are in production. Technology infrastructure platforms such as operating systems, application servers, and communication services often provide monitoring capabilities that can be leveraged by monitoring tools (such as Microsoft Management Console, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, and jManage). 

However, for monitoring application-specific functionality, such as what user interface (UI) features are being used by given types of users, instrumentation that is compliant with your organization's monitoring infrastructure will need to be built into the applications. Development teams need to be aware of this operational requirement or, better yet, have access to a framework that makes it straightforward to provide such instrumentation.

Practice 10: Automated Dashboards

 

The practice of using automated dashboards is business intelligence (BI) for IT. There are two aspects to this, development intelligence and operational intelligence. Development intelligence requires the use of development tools that are instrumented to generate metrics; for example, your configuration management (CM) tools already record who checked in what and when they did it.

Continuous integration tools could similarly record when a build occurred, how many tests ran, how long the tests ran, whether the build was successful, how many tests we successful, and so on. This sort of raw data can then be analyzed and displayed in automated dashboards.

Operational intelligence is an aspect of application monitoring discussed previously. With automated dashboards, an organization's overall metrics overhead can be dramatically reduced (although not completely eliminated because not everything can be automated). Automated dashboards provide real-time insight to an organization's governance teams.

DevOps Is Really About Culture

 

After describing these critical practices which support DevOps, I feel the need to emphasize that the primary critical success factor is to build a collaborative and respectful culture across your entire IT organization. My experience is that people, and the way that they work together, are the primary determinant of success when it comes to adopting an effective DevOps strategy. Unfortunately, it is considerably more difficult to bring about cultural change in an organization than it is to adopt a handful of new practices.

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