CA Technologies, sustainability analyst, Ana Jamborcic, has been writing on the CA Technologies blog about how to have a successful DevOps strategy.
The analyst has noted the three most important tips for improving your DevOps processes, based upon recent studies by Gene Kim.
It is important for DevOps to use a metric to, ‘measure for success,’ such as the concept of "lead-time" which could give DevOps an analogous metric that shows quality, customer happiness and profitability.
Jamborcic, writes: "For DevOps, this metric would be focused on how long it takes to get code from commit to production. Long lead times in software development are correlated with higher numbers of incidents."
"Therefore, measuring the "time it takes to get code from commit to production" would be a better leading indicator of success and customer satisfaction."
Organisations also need to have a plan for every scenario and be able to optimise disaster recovery. The things organisations need to do are to, monitor proactively, deploy more frequently and rely on peer review rather than change control to manage changes.
It was noted by Gene Kim, entrepreneur, researcher and author, that the greater the distance between the person doing the work and the person signing off on it, the more likely an undesirable outcome will occur.
Jamborcic, wrote: "This is why it’s important to empower the people doing the work, while minimizing change control on sign off requirements. This requires fostering a culture of trust in combination with smaller, disciplined testing teams."
Finally, it is important to throw chaos into the mix. Jamborcic highlights Netflix’s, "Chaos Monkey," which is a service that simulates failure by randomly killing other services in production.
The purpose of this is to enable the company to be able to more easily handle planned and unplanned AWS outages. The point is that in order to be prepared for the unexpected, you need to randomly test the robust nature of your environment.
