The extremes of application release velocity are converging in the enterprise. Whereas Fortune 500 enterprises may have historically taken months to years for each release cycle, they are exploring new approaches from new age Internet technology firms that release new versions of an application several times in a day.
According to a recent report on DevOps adoption, 86% of IT and business decision makers have either implemented DevOps or will roll out DevOps initiatives within the next 3 years. There is a strong appetite for enterprise DevOps, but where do you start?
For DevOps projects, Ops will need to shift from a systems management approach to a programmatic approach. Ops should work with Dev to figure out the automation required to provision and deploy the application. Here is a three step roadmap for enterprise DevOps for those organizations looking to roll out successful DevOps initiatives:
Step 1: Select The Right Application Candidates.
Not every enterprise application is a right candidate for DevOps. Traditional applications are not architected for DevOps velocity, whereas enterprise applications designed with agile and iterative techniques are excellent candidates for DevOps. DevOps may be an overkill for applications where the underlying business process rarely changes. Dev and IT Ops should choose one or two applications for DevOps style implementation.
Step 2: Manage Your Application Lifecycle With Automation.
Provision applications as part of the build process itself. During deployment, Ops should be able to execute a piece of code to identify application monitoring needs. Your automation framework should manage application health without manual intervention.
- Can you fix application issues using runbooks?
- Do you have scripts for scaling, maintaining, and load balancing the application?
- How do you plan for new releases?
- How do you upgrade the application?
Treat your infrastructure as code. Application configuration, deployment, and maintenance all need to be part of an automation framework. Ops should build concurrency with the application. You should be able to configure, deploy, and bring the entire application live within no time.
Step 3: Embrace Compliance Driven Operations.
Your IT Ops automation framework should deliver the right visibility to support more frequent releases without complex manual processes.
- Are you able to automate monitoring of the infrastructure for delivering the best end user experience?
- How do you ensure that the right infrastructure resources are available for running the application?
- Can you keep your infrastructure current by maintaining the right patch levels?
Enterprises can modernize application delivery pipelines by selecting the right application candidates, managing application lifecycles with automation, and embracing compliance driven operations. While you might never deploy code 23,000 times a day like Amazon.com, the Enterprise DevOps framework will help you release applications faster, with higher quality and lesser risk of deployment failure.
About the Author / Varma Kunaparaju
Varma Kunaparaju is CTO at Vistara and a seasoned technologist with over 20 years of experience leading engineering teams to deliver enterprise software. Reach him on twitter at: @varma1