Overview of DevOps

DevOps is more about the culture of an organization, processes, and technology to develop communication and collaboration between Development and IT Operations teams so as to manage the application life cycle more effectively than the existing ways of doing it. We often tend to work based on patterns to find reusable solutions from similar kind of problems or challenges.

Over the years, achievements and failed experiments, best practices, automation scripts, configuration management tools, and methodologies became an integral part of the culture. This helps to define practices for ways of designing, developing, testing, setting up resources, managing environments, managing configuration, deploying an application, gathering feedback, performing code improvements, and doing innovations. It helps to train people to think that drive the DevOps culture at every stage.

The DevOps culture is considered to be an innovative package to integrate the Dev and Ops teams in an effective manner that includes components, such as continuous build Integration, continuous testing, cloud resource provisioning, CD, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, continuous feedback, continuous improvement, and continuous innovation, to make application delivery faster as per the demands of the agile methodology.

Considering the way we have been doing things to manage applications over the years, it is a challenge to change the culture. Mr. David Gleicher created the formula for change, and later it was refined by Kathie Dannemiller. This formula is still relevant as it provides a model to assess the relative strengths affecting the success possibilities of organizational change initiatives.

As per the formula, three factors must be available for a meaningful organizational change to take place. I just tried to classify different things in these three factors:

• D = Dissatisfaction with how things are and how cumbersome they are! (Manual Processes + Repetitive work + Rigidness of processes + No flexibility + Huge CapEx + No visibility)
• V = Vision of what is possible and what is the opportunity available with disruptive innovation in recent times (Cost benefits -> Pay as you Use + Automation + Agility + Scalability + Increased efficiency and productivity + Continuous improvements + Continuous innovations)
• F = First concrete steps to achieve the vision (Continuous Integration + Continuous Testing + Cloud Provisioning + Configuration Management + Continuous Delivery + Continuous Deployment + Orchestration + Continuous Monitoring + Continuous Feedback);

If the product of these three factors is greater than R = Resistance, then change is possible. If any one factor is absent (zero) or low while D, V, and F are multiplied, then the multiplication will be zero or low and therefore it may not overcome the resistance. Even without numerical values, the outcome of this formula is very much in the favor of change considering the values.

To bring an organization-wide change, we must consider the possibility of dissatisfaction in people and try to bring the change in mindsets by sharing industry trends, leadership ideas, best practices, and competitor analysis to identify the necessity for change. Hence, to ensure a successful change, it is the need of the hour to use influence and think strategically to create a vision and identify the basic steps toward it. To change the culture of an organization effectively, we the people need to bring in an agile, standardized environment, uniform automation processes orchestration, and DevOps enablers. Essentially, it means the combination of people, processes, and tools to achieve efficiency.

In other words, the DevOps culture is not much different than the organization culture, which has shared values and behavioral aspects. It needs adjustments in mindsets and processes to align with the new technology and tools.

At the end of the day, the ball is in our court and we should remember that we can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. To be more precise, the early bird catches the worm.

In the next section, we will describe in detail about the role and benefits of PaaS and aPaaS in DevOps.