We discussed the definition of DevOps in Chapter 2, Building Microservices with Spring Boot. Here is a quick recap of the DevOps definition.
Gartner defines DevOps as follows:
"DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture), and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology — especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective."
DevOps and microservices evolved independently. Chapter 1, Demystifying Microservices, explored the evolution of microservices. In this section, we will review the evolution of DevOps and then take a look at how DevOps supports microservices adoption.
In the era of digital disruption and in order to support modern business, IT organizations have to master two key areas: speed of delivery and value-driven delivery. This is obviously apart from being expert in leading technologies.
Many IT organizations failed to master this change, causing frustration to business users. To overcome this situation, many business departments started their own shadow IT or stealth IT under their control. Some smart IT organizations then adopted a lean IT model to respond to these situations.
However, many organizations still struggle with this transformation due to the large baggage of legacy systems and processes. Gartner coined the concept of a pace-layered application strategy. Gartner's view is that high speed is required only for certain types of applications or certain business areas. Gartner termed this a system of innovation. A system of innovation requires rapid innovations compared to a system of records. As a system of innovations needs rapid innovation, a lean IT delivery model is essential for such applications. Practitioners evangelized the lean IT model as DevOps.
There are two key strategies used by organizations to adopt DevOps.
Some organizations positioned DevOps as a process to fill the gaps in their existing processes. Such organizations adopted an incremental strategy for their DevOps journey. The adoption path starts with Agile development, then incrementally adopts continuous integration, automated testing, and release to production and then all DevOps practices. The challenge in such organizations is the time to realize the full benefits as well as the mixed culture of people due to legacy processes.
Many organizations, therefore, take a disruptive approach to adopt DevOps. This will be achieved by partitioning IT into two layers or even as two different IT units. The high-speed layer of IT uses DevOps-style practices to dramatically change the culture of the organization with no connection to the legacy processes and practices. A selective application cluster will be identified and moved to the new IT based on the business value:
The intention of DevOps is not just to reduce cost. It also enables the business to disrupt competitors by quickly moving ideas to production. DevOps attacks traditional IT issues in multiple ways, as explained here.
DevOps processes and practices essentially speed up deliveries which improves quality. The speed of delivery is achieved by cutting IT wastage. This is achieved by avoiding work that adds no value to the business nor to desired business outcomes. IT wastage includes software defects, productivity issues, process overheads, time lag in decision making, time spent in reporting layers, internal governance, overestimation, and so on. By reducing these wastages, organizations can radically improve the speed of delivery. The wastage is reduced by primarily adopting Agile processes, tools, and techniques.
By automating the manually executed tasks, one can dramatically improve the speed of delivery as well as the quality of deliverables. The scope of automation goes from planning to customer feedback. Automation reduces the time to move business ideas to production. This also reduces a number of manual gate checks, bureaucratic decision making, and so on. Automated monitoring mechanisms and feedback go back to the development factory, which gets it fixed and quickly moved to production.
DevOps reduces the gap between IT and business through value-driven delivery. Value-driven delivery closely aligns IT to business by understanding true business values and helps the business by quickly delivering these values, which can give a competitive advantage. This is similar to the shadow IT concept, in which IT is collocated with the business and delivers business needs quickly, rather than waiting for heavy project investment-delivery cycles.
Traditionally, IT is partially disconnected from the business and works with IT KPIs, such as the number of successful project deliveries, whereas in the new model, IT shares business KPIs. As an example, a new IT KPI could be that IT helped business to achieve a 10% increase in sales orders or led to 20% increase in customer acquisition. This will shift IT's organizational position from merely a support organization to a business partner.
Traditionally, IT has different teams for development and operations. In many cases, they are differentiated with logical barriers. DevOps reduces the gap between the development and operations teams so that it can potentially reduce wastage and improve quality. Multidisciplinary teams work together to address problems at hand rather than throwing mud across the wall.
With DevOps, operations teams will have a fairly good understanding about the services and applications developed by development teams. Similarly, development teams will have a good handle on the infrastructure components and configurations used by the applications. As a result, operations teams can make decisions based exactly on service behaviors rather than enforcing standard organizational policies and rules when designing infrastructure components. This would eventually help the IT organization to improve the quality of the product as well as the time to resolve incidents and problem management.
In the DevOps world, speed of delivery is achieved through the automation of high-velocity changes, and quality is achieved through automation and people. Business values are achieved through efficiency, speed of delivery, quality, and the ability to innovate. Cost reduction is achieved through automation, productivity, and reducing wastage.