X’s journey in implementing DevOps

Ever since the inception of Information Technology and its ecosystem, the stories of collaboration between the Development and Operations departments in IT companies have been confrontational because of certain contradictions in their respective job definitions.

Here’s where DevOps steps in to fill the gaps in collaboration, integration & communication between them, thereby enabling organizations to accelerate application delivery, continuous software delivery, minimizing management complexities, enhanced problem resolutions etc.

“DevOps is the implementation of a set of cultural or philosophical practices between the operations and development engineers contributing to the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to delivery.”

The “definition” of DevOps is not just limited to collaboration between development and operations or be it using code as infrastructure or enhancing automation in software delivery or improving cross-functional culture between the teams but…it importantly represents one core delivery characteristic. AGILITY.

X’s timely understanding of DevOps and its core feature mentioned above has made us adopt and implement its practices in our solution delivery. It all started when our CEO Mr Sadheesh Venugopal stressed the positive outcomes of DevOps through a presentation “DevOps – Sustainable dynamics between Operations and Development” in ‘DevOps DownUnder’ – a conference that was held at Sydney.

X’s DevOps implementation strategy

Before implementation, X conducted a detailed assessment about its incorporations that asked questions like “Does DevOps really benefit X?” & “Is X ready to spend on resources to implement DevOps” & “To what scale should X implement it?” and arrived at favourable answers which are making us write about it here today.

X identified and instilled DevOps practices customized for and by X is a step by step manner as precisely mentioned below

• Enhancing communications between Operations and Development teams

X strived to improve the communication and co-operation between the development, production and operations teams by tracking the patterns in collaboration flow between these teams. The patterns provided us with many insights that helped us to build proper collaboration routes, feedback loops and strings to fill the gaps to form a closely-knit working unit. Some of the following practices were followed in this stage.

X integrated the work functions of Development, Production and Operations teams and stressed the importance of holding a sense of ownership to the project as a whole rather than their individual job definitions.

• Imbibing Agile practices

The first step in implementation saved more time, effort and resources in project delivery which provided an 18% percent time window. This also helped us accommodate ad hoc requests and augment our agility factors to provide increased value.

• Amazon Web Server

Later, X sought to lean the solution delivery process by harnessing the capabilities of AWS DevOps tools in the delivery workflow. The tools used were

AWS CodeCommit - Continuous Integration service that helps to create repositories & privately store, manage assets in the cloud.

AWS CodePipeline - Continuous Delivery service used to model, visualize, and automate software release procedures.

AWS CodeDeploy - Continuous Deployment service which helps coordination with application deployments to Amazon EC2 instances.

• Using inbuilt tools

After 4 years of experience and learning in implementing DevOps, X is now in pursuit of exploring the possibilities of building its own tools to handle its DevOps framework. This initiative is under exploration so as to further reduce time & costs and simultaneously increase the functionalities by incorporating the native, in house requests and build a more customized DevOps framework.

X possesses the advanced fundamental framework and has scaled up its DevOps infrastructure in a commendable manner in a short span.

Strategic outcomes of implementing DevOps in X’s solution delivery

• Enabling Agile development

DevOps framework enabled X to expand agile development practices’ thereby enabling frequent roll-outs of software builds between the development, operations and production teams with effortlessness.

• Saves a lot of time

Ease of communication between the functional teams resulted in enhanced cross-functional capabilities. This resulted in

o 26% less time on unplanned activities

o 54% less time on security issues

o 24 x faster disaster recovery rates

• Speed and Quality Boost

X monitored the improvements in quality and speed of solution delivery execution. The following were our findings

o Quality in Software Deployments increased by 60%

o Process & requirements visibility increased by 58%

o Cultural and collaboration change between teams increased by 61%

o Responsiveness to business requirements increased by 55%

o Agile Development and change management process increased by 40%

o Quality of Code increased by 36%

• Increase deployment frequency

X measured a multifold increase in deployment frequency which is 200 times than the usual. These numbers are more than the usual industry average.

• Change in failure rates

Change failure rates results landed at 3 times less than usual rates before the implementation of DevOps framework.

So collectively, we figured a way to measure the return on investment in implementing the DevOps framework using a proprietary DevOps index (which is calculated by an algorithm that takes into account the time, effort, resource, money & results after DevOps and compares it with the time, effort, resource, money & results that X would have spent without DevOps). This index has been on a positive scale ever since the construction of the DevOps framework which now stands at an all-time high of 66 points on 100.

This scale of success in building DevOps framework that we achieved is a direct measure of the value proposition that X can provide to its clients and partners by ensuring effective solution delivery.