Top 10 tips to learn DevOps

As DevOps becomes a key factor in a growing number of large companies and organizations, it is important that we take a look at what companies are doing to implement it successfully.

It is becoming abundantly clear that DevOps, when used right, is an extremely helpful tool. In June of this year, a Puppet survey found that IT departments that use DevOps methods successfully deploy software an average of 200 times more frequently than ones who do not. Likewise, they had recovery times that outpaced their non-DevOps-using contemporaries by 24 times and had change failure rates that were one-third the size.

Because of this success, DevOps is becoming extremely popular, with Indeed reporting that since 2012 job postings that include DevOps rose from less than 1% to 30%.

The following are 10 things that tech leaders must know about the implementation of DevOps:

1. It is important that corporate policies do not interfere with the collaboration of the development team and the IT team. The development team must be given the freedom and resources that will empower the success of the DevOps. This will result in Agile methods that shorten release cycles and reduce deployment downtime. However, the responsibility lies in the management to support this culture change and break down any barriers between these two segments of the company.
2. Don’t lose sight of why you are doing what you are doing. Often people can get lost in making sure that they are performing the task correctly without taking stock of why they are doing it and without taking the whole IT organization into account. Instead, move from one bottleneck to the next, improving each one so that the whole system continues to pick up speed and efficiency.
3. Just because you will be using the DevOps methodology to automate many parts of the system does not mean jobs will be lost. DevOps means changing the way that the development team works with the operations team, not eliminating either one.
4. Continuous feedback is a crucial element to measuring effectiveness and creating successful DevOps. Every part of the process, including development, design, and product management, can use continuous feedback. It is important not to maintain a linear view of the delivery process and you must constantly learn from your mistakes in order to grow.
5. Teamwork and mutual respect cannot be understated. All of the employees need to be on the same page and work together for the common goal. Managers need to make sure that no specific team can interrupt the flow of the organization as a whole in order to get a specific feature deployed. Using chat rooms where everyone can discuss what is going on can be helpful.
6. Address security sooner rather than later in the development cycle. Making decisions about DevOps without taking security into account can be extremely dangerous. Security needs to exist as a feature of the product and not be looked at as something that can be dealt with later on.
7. Take into account the third-party suppliers because your organization depends on their services. In order to grow, you will need to build good relationships with these suppliers that will thrive on honest and good feedback.
8. With DevOps, regulatory compliance will still be relevant and developers will not have to have root access to production servers. Instead, they will use similar mechanisms that manage production and non-production servers and will minimize potential problems.
9. Take into account that DevOps teams spend about 25 hours per week monitoring their cloud environments, which can take away time that is needed for other job functions.
10. Share all information and progress across the organization. Status updates and failure notifications can really help an organization stay on the same page and increase productivity and speed.

As DevOps continues to grow and prove its value to many companies and organizations, every tech leader should take these ten tips and make sure to incorporate them into their company. DevOps is not something that you can implement once and then act like a bystander but needs to be constantly worked on and improved. There are an infinite amount of things you can be doing to increase the speed of your production and the efficiency of your team, but taking these ten tips into account will be a giant step in the right direction.