DevOps, which refers to the increased communication and collaboration between development and IT operations, is an ever-changing, sometimes complicated term. While “dev” and “ops”were once siloed with separate philosophies, practices, tools, and workflows, they’re merging into one. The result? A more efficient, reliable process and product that is helping organizations create stronger ties between all stakeholders throughout the development lifecycle, so it’s no surprise that DevOps is rapidly gaining popularity around the world.

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In my experience, organizations that fail to embrace DevOps do so at their own considerable risk. Not too long ago, a major real estate developer was looking to solve a critical problem. The company’s application kept crashing and they couldn’t figure out why. Essentially, the company’s .NET installation was having problems with a third-party web asset management library, which had specific write-to-disk configuration requirements. These requirements were configured properly in the development environment, but not in production. Because developers were siloed from production — with no process for keeping these environments in sync — the company was unaware of the oversight. The end result? The company encountered ongoing performance problems in production and was
unable to identify the root cause of ongoing application instance crashes that were masked by autorestart policies.

On a foundational level, a dysfunctional culture was largely responsible for the company’s production mishaps, with “code being thrown over the wall” from development to production. Communication between these groups was so poor that a contractor was the primary liaison between developers, operations and management. Additionally, there
was a loss of tribal knowledge every time a technical practitioner left the organization. None of the devs knew anything about the troublesome third-party tool, nor how it was being used. Even the contractor — the sole link between the siloed factions — was unaware of the problematic utility and the critical role it played.

Embracing a new culture
As we enter a new era of DevOps that takes advantage of collaboration, it is imperative that IT leaders look at the current state of their infrastructure and consider not only the technologies that will further enhance their application environments but also the cultural changes that might be necessary.

For starters, communication and knowledge transfer between teams are critical. Agile development practices tend to come with methods of communication available to the whole team, be they daily standups, Scrum or Kanban boards, or narrow Slack channels. The modern DevOps organization should include representatives from all teams in these channels so that everyone can participate and be aware of what is happening, and when.

Embracing automation
The number one lesson from DevOps and Agile is the need for automation. The first automation tool that most organizations adopt is Continuous Integration (CI), so that code is built early and often. To make this work well, organizations will also standardize environments. Each environment — development, production, and so on — should be as similar as possible, with continuous integration and eventually, continuous deployment (CD).

Once code is being built regularly we want to improve testing so that we ensure code is of the
highest quality before it is deployed. 2019 has seen some major innovations when it comes to automated testing tools, moving beyond unit tests and making it much easier for organizations to build the functional tests that reflect how users actually engage with applications. Cloud computing has made it possible for organizations to run thousands of functional tests in a short period of time, automatically. New analytics tools help organizations understand what code is changing and what needs to be tested, which allows this process to be optimized even further.

Finally, more organizations are embracing modern application monitoring tools that allow both Devs and Ops to understand how applications are working in production. Overall, this means everyone is contributing to the success of the application which leads to end-user happiness and better business outcomes.