Seven Steps to Start Modern DevOps

So you want to be a DevOps shop. Starting from scratch, changing the way you do business is a daunting task. So I asked colleagues in engineering and IT operations how we did it.

Let’s not get this twisted: DevOps requires significant investment in time, resources and effort to get off the ground. But as our Director of Operations told me, “It’s really just teams that work well together.”

That being said, here are seven things you can do to help IT developers and operations staff work together more effectively:

Technical Steps

• Connect Your Tools: Integrate and connect with your existing development, deployment, management, monitoring and collaboration platforms. From HipChat to Slack, ServiceNow to JIRA, Splunk to New Relic and beyond, use a communications platform that can hand off data between these systems, while engaging the right people along the way. Use intelligent responses to operationalize and automate key interactions that drive logical next steps and workflow.
• Experiment: I know, I know, this seems to contradict documenting everything. But really, it doesn’t. One of the goals of DevOps is continuous improvement. It just doesn’t happen if you’re always using the same tools and processes when technology changes so fast. So figure out how to experiment with new tools and new ways of doing things, but if you’re an enterprise DevOps organization, document and keep track of how things work so you can apply solutions that work for your group and ditch the ones that don’t.
• Automate: Automate testing as much as possible. It saves time, ensures it is always performed, and improves results.

Cultural Steps

• Play Nice: Often each group claims its own services, and one group has to ask permission to use it, and the communication breakdown and distrust just grow. Furthermore, the services accumulate through duplication, which is not good for process or budget.
• Document: Startups and tiny organizations might be able to get away with winging it, but enterprise DevOps requires following processes. And let’s face it: processes without documentation are, well, not really processes at all. They’re just vague suggestions that no one follows. I think the chaos that generally ensues is pretty familiar to everyone.
• Divide and Conquer: At least for us, dividing into smaller groups has worked better. Each group has a specific focus, so there’s no duplication of work and no work falls through the cracks. The small size of the groups also helps keep each group nimble and agile so work progresses faster. What’s that? How do so many small groups work together and communicate effectively? Well….
• Embed Frenemies: Not really frenemies, of course. We’re all friends here. But we’re embedding developers in operations groups and operations workers in development groups. The result is full communication, especially with each person’s former group. You can imagine how much faster people learn new skills and processes, why the other side does things the way it does, and how everyone can work together better.

Learn More About DevOps Toolchains

We’re not the only ones promoting the idea of creating a toolchain that you can use as you move processes forward. In a new research note, Avoid Failure by Developing a Toolchain That Enables DevOps, Gartner discusses the merits of a DevOps toolchain as well. Read it with our compliments!

For more on how xMatters can help with DevOps processes and operations, read more about our DevOps solutions.

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