DevOps has become that celebrity who’s always the talk of the town but is largely misunderstood. It’s even quoted in the wrong context.
A few days back, while speaking at a conference, I was interacting with audience and one of the attendees said DevOps is like the backbone of Agile. I think that’s an excellent way of describing DevOps. In an industry where we are still struggling to implement Agile—and even more so to keep people from drifting—is DevOps ahead of its time? Maybe not.
DevOps is the set of practices necessary to sustain the fast pace of delivery. The best part of DevOps is there are no levels or certifications one needs to achieve. It’s the stack of practices that you pick and implement and reap benefits. The 7Cs—continuous planning, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous testing, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring and continuous operations—help maintain sanity, though.
One teams had to sustain fast-paced releases with a big customer base. We saw our users increase from .1 million to 2.4 million in three years. Agile, continuous integration and continuous delivery are not just fads for us, but needs for survival.
Using the Rotating Roster Method
When we talk about continuous delivery but then focus on just delivery, it’s not enough. It’s equally important to work on what happens post-deployment, such as continuous monitoring and continuous operations.
Rotating Roster is one practice we use in our organization and this has helped us pull together the whole ecosystem of:
- Resolving customer issues,
- Feedback system pumping into out technical pipeline/debt for next releases,
- Knowledge transfer and learning ecosystem to address attrition, and
- Broken silos.
Here’s how we do this. First, we define the scope of the Roster. We picked the following:
- Production Outage
- Customer issues/P1
- Ad hoc requests from stakeholders
- Data extraction (only tasks out of scope of a separate Data Analytics team)
Next, we publish a schedule of every two to four weeks, designating at least one person to be on the Roster. It’s essential that the Roster rotates to all or most in the team to build a bus factor or a knowledge transfer ecosystem in the team.
For each request received, we asked the Roster person to log it in JIRA. This was not just for bookkeeping sake, but as an essential step in line with the Roster objective.
After every Roster period, we sat down and reviewed these JIRA requests for possible targets to:
- Automate the task or the effort involved, such as account creation requests automated by writing php scripts, for example.
- Delegate the task to the right team to cut the effort. For example, for a new data extraction we set up SQL slaves and replicate tables on analytics machines, then delegate the task to them for all future instances.
- Mitigate the reason for the request, such as the root cause of an outage.
The mitigation/automation steps had to be picked by development team in their Sprints. Otherwise, usually they become technical debt and lay around in the backlog.
Since the development team was taking turns on the Roster, they understood the priority and necessity of doing the task. Thus, the technical pipeline was chosen and fed actively.
Another advantage of the Roster was it showed the team the “big picture” and helped catch early trends.
The Rotating Roster system turned out to be a big success for our teams; thus, we replicated the model through the rest of the organization. It’s a small but essential step to adopting DevOps culture.
In one definition, Jez Humble explained that DevOps is “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly changing resilient systems at scale.”
I could not have put it in better words.
About the Author / Kiran Chhabra
Kiran Chhabra is Vice President of Engineering at Infoedge India Ltd. She has 14 years of industry experience designing and implementing highly scalable and available architectures with optimized continuous integration and delivery in technologies including LAMP, Java and mobile technologies.
Kiran holds a U.S. Patent and has published technical papers. She is certified scrum master and certified scrum professional, and speaks at various Scrum Alliance & technical conferences in India and the United States. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
