Alternatively to Agile methodology, the basic ideology of DevOps is based on tools, practices, and a philosophy that encourages integration and automation. Agile was designed to shorten development cycles by breaking them into clusters that are easier to manage and release products quicker than the waterfall methodology. The DevOps concept was generated over the fact that the development community felt a level of dysfunction in the technology industry that signified the need to shift the speed and quality of the software deployment and shift the way we think about the development process. DevOps offered to deliver applications faster and, in the same manner, decrease the failure rate. The DevOps mindset and culture at its heart entails collaboration and shared responsibility, increased transparency, and communication between company teams.
After the DevOps conception back in 2007, Azure DevOps saw the light of day as SaaS and became popular in 2018 cause it offers flexibility, supports several languages, runs on any platform, and can be deployed to any cloud service. It also goes a step ahead and can be integrated with most CI/CD tools out there: Android, Ansible, AWS, Azure, GitHub, GCP, Java, Jenkins, iOS, Kubernetes, and Linux.
Azure DevOps contains several services that cover the entire development life-cycle: Azure Boards to support planning and tracking capabilities, Pipelines to provide continuous integration and delivery, Test Plans to test as you go, Marketplace to add functionalities that fit your needs, Artifacts to allow your team to share packages into your pipelines, and Repos to provide source control.
Even though Azure DevOps has been around for a while and DevOps was born over a decade ago, organizations know the term, have a team with its name but the employees responsible do not have the correct training. In addition to this, other barriers that prevent the DevOps implementation are legacy infrastructure and, most importantly, the time it takes the company to adjust to a new mindset and work culture.
Things to consider if your company wants to transition into Azure DevOps are:
- Open the channels of communication between your teams. Island teams or siloing knowledge cannot prevail.
- During transition times, allow your teams to make mistakes, ask questions, and hire professionals.
- Remember that a new set of processes break our comfort bubble and allow us to invent and generate new company dynamics.
According to the Atlassian survey 2020: 46% of organizations are new to DevOps with under 3 years of doing it, and 54% have been practicing DevOps for 3 years or more.
To sum up
Executives and practitioners have yet to see eye to eye on the success of DevOps so far since the outlook for each one is rooted in very different places. Practitioners strive to breach the collaboration gap while executives emphasize individual efforts. Over the years, more and more companies have started to embrace Azure DevOps as the in-house standard to carry out the development cycle of their products. More often than not, it directly impacts the business metrics and goals. Embracing the DevOps culture will streamline your software releases and directly impact company and employee satisfaction.
