Adopting DevOps Culture When Migrating to Cloud

Cloud computing necessitates substantial flexibility for businesses in order to reduce barriers to entry into a platform that is scalable and enables rapid innovative growth. The tough part begins when platform owners have to choose the type of migration procedure to use to move their platform to the cloud. Even a straightforward lift and shift depends on a lot of variables, and needs restructuring and planning.

There are many different approaches for platform migration to the cloud. The main objective is to give your business speed, agility, and the ability to experiment in an economical way, regardless of how the migration is addressed, whether it is through the refactoring method or down to the typical re-host technique. A migration may cause downtime or prevent your company from fully optimizing benefits of the cloud if it is poorly planned or executed.

While migrating to cloud, there are possibilities of encountering inconsistencies along the way, conflicts with different existing policies and the legacy or core services that are about to change. Therefore, migrations demand an in-depth, granular planning and cross-disciplinary awareness of platform minutiae, along with meticulous, detailed preparation, assistance and advisory from domain professionals (platform architects, operations experts, developer resources) with team collaboration and cooperation.

Today, many advanced technology teams are evolving their DevOps processes to address these inefficiencies, bridge the gaps between disciplines, and realign previously disparate interests. Let see how automation and DevOps are becoming viable goals on roadmap to cloud migration for businesses offering a great platform to pursue the most awaited cultural shift.

Why Adopt DevOps Culture

The use of a set of cultural concepts, practices, and technological tools collectively referred to as "DevOps" improves an organization's capacity to deliver applications and services at high velocity—that is, to change and improve products more quickly than with conventional software development and infrastructure management techniques. Due to this quickness, firms can better serve their customers and increase their marketability. Your ability to successfully migrate to the cloud may be greatly impacted by using a DevOps approach.

Furthermore, DevOps supports a flexible experimentation phase, adaptability, and an agile engineering culture. In DevOps, the iterative aspects such as develop, test, deploy, scale, failover, and recover are designed to be streamlined. The key DevOps concepts of shared accountability, agility, transparency, and minimal risks through automation have been shown to be essential for handling complicated projects like corporate platform migrations.

DevOps enables businesses to achieve change quickly by combining the heritage culture and practice with a set of paths. Ultimately, by successfully competing to the industry expectations, organizations can attain their business ambitions better and produce more significant ROI with DevOps.

Establishing a Mature DevOps Practice in Your Organization

Modern development teams immediately deploy each developer's changes to enormous environments many times a day. Deploying more frequently and in smaller increments can reduce significant risk during deployment. Lower change deltas reduce the time it takes to find and resolve issues, which is further reduced by rapid feedback loops enabled by extensive automated testing of each change increment.

Companies were able to perform more tests at a lower cost and iterate more quickly as a result of the use of automation by DevOps teams to move their infrastructure and workload to the cloud. Here is a list of elements that support developing a mature DevOps practice inside your organization to assure continuous improvement to your software and services and meet your business goals.

1. Encourage a collaborative culture

The successful collaboration between the operations and development teams is the first and most crucial tenet of DevOps. The DevOps team can concentrate on achieving the organization's common goals and serve its purpose by forming a unilateral team. The main idea behind this notion is to make sure that the team works well together and communicates with one another so that they can exchange ideas and work through challenges.

In this approach, silos can be broken down and people, processes, and technology can all work together to achieve corporate goals. Such specialized teams can generate a fluid experience through process alignment, which can support a culture of innovations and deployments throughout the whole business.

2. Automate as much as you can

The necessity of the era is automation. Continuous development is necessary to satisfy client needs as consumer awareness grows. With this in mind, significant progress has been made in terms of implementing technologies that assist automation as well as optimizing other processes, such as configuration management, the CI/CD pipeline, and others.

Several procedures can be automated during the automation phase to operate effectively with the available resources. This may entail setting up new systems, developing new infrastructure, deploying software, and running numerous tests for functionality and security compliance.

DevOps enable teams to create their own automated procedures and expedite development and deployment processes. In addition, while maintaining their dependability, machines can be effectively trained to distribute software more quickly than they often do.

3. Make data- driven decisions

Success is the result of making wise choices over time. By always pursuing alignment with product and technology objectives and vice versa; business strategy and financial planning cycles must adjust to the reality of constantly changing markets. This calls for a more thorough, data-driven decision-making process at all levels.

4. Utilize Infrastructure-as-a-code strategy

Every development effort should be cloud-native, use an infrastructure-as-a-code methodology, use tools like AWS CloudFormation, and reduce reliance on manual processes by utilizing the appropriate public, private, and/or hybrid cloud infrastructure. With this method, you can configure, manage, grow, and recover from problems while eliminating manual labor and human error. Eventually, the entire infrastructure lifecycle will be totally automated.

5. Encourage tool-driven teamwork

Deep, effective, tool-driven teamwork amongst knowledgeable, cross-functional persons working as members of a team that carry out a product development and operations lifecycle is a trait of mature DevOps teams.

6. Adopt a customer first approach

Brands that don't continually innovate cannot satisfy the requirements of the consumer. For the same reason, brands must act like lean start-ups that innovate as the times change. Continuous improvement, which focuses on performance, speed, and cost of delivery optimization, is a key component of DevOps. Adopting DevOps necessitates a strong organizational commitment to ongoing improvement. Continual experimentation combined with a strong dedication to ongoing learning results in continuous progress. The effective business will discover how to ask questions and reduce the likelihood of making incorrect assumptions.

To satisfy their customers' needs, DevOps teams are always on the go. The information acquired through automated procedures can be examined to see whether performance goals are being fulfilled, which will eventually result in customer satisfaction.

7. Establish a culture to support consolidated responsibility

Traditionally, developers and operations teams used to operate independently with little to no communication. On the contrary, the DevOps environment compels both the teams to collaborate in order to accomplish shared objectives and function as a single team. But now that the DevOps culture has changed, this idea is approached differently. A space for everyone and everything is provided inside the teams, and inefficiencies are eliminated.

Migrating to Cloud with DevOps Culture

Early adoption and adherence to DevOps methods allow for low-risk migration implementation. DevOps offers a range of immediate and long-term business benefits, including repeatability, accuracy, much fewer deployment risks, and shorter iteration cycles - all of which are critical for employee engagement, operational efficiency, security architecture, and competitive advantage.

Here are few best practices that helped organization to successfully implement the cultural changes required to adopt DevOps when migrating to cloud.

Best Practices to Inculcate DevOps Cultural Shift When Migrating to Cloud

1. Emphasizing the hiring process

DevOps, at its heart, unites development and operations teams that have been divided for a while due to your outdated software development life cycle (SDLC). To ensure that employees collaborate and effectively provide solutions to the market, DevOps mandates that enterprises change their strategy.

Reviewing the selection criteria for new employees is one method to guarantee a focus on people and culture. Since generalists are better able to manage the constantly changing demands of development, DevOps teams place more emphasis on employing them. As DevOps approaches grow, generalists will need to embrace a software development perspective.

Organizations can opt for hiring generalists who are open to adopt a software developer’s mindset easily.

2. Sharing accountability

Development teams have been plagued with application outages all the time. DevOps teams are further motivated to incorporate methods that guarantee continuity by the pressure to please customers and ensure application uptime.

Set high priority on delivering workloads and applications that are extremely robust, and then hold the company responsible. Teams are more inclined to collaborate and tempers are less likely to flare when simple KPIs like Mean Time to Production, Deployment Frequency, and Mean Time to Recovery are established.

3. Considering learning and training as an ongoing activity

Many SDLC procedures are made clearer by DevOps. Simple operations become programmed and flexible. This increases operations' predictability, effectiveness, security, and sustainability to the fullest. Automation frequently serves as assistant for these procedures and methods. Make continual training a part of your DevOps adoption plan to establish the expectation of continual improvement.

Leaders need to give the necessary tools so that their staff can stay up to date with the rest of the industry when new technology and best practices are developed. This covers actions like earning certifications and gaining practical knowledge of certain DevOps technologies.

4. Working together towards a single objective

The mechanics of cooperation in a DevOps system is another topic of research. DevOps breaks down silos and forces stakeholders from various business divisions to collaborate, therefore it promotes empathy and mutual understanding as fundamental team principles that help people work together toward a single objective. To encourage communication and collaboration among team members, organizations can find it advantageous to participate in team-building exercises.

Final Takeaway

•  The DevOps ecosystem consists of a diverse range of frameworks, technologies, and cultural elements.
•  However, as history has shown, processes change through time and tools are always being changed. What will endure are the cultural shifts that fuel the adaptability required to change along with the ecology.
•  In order to support self-organizing teams based on products and applications, organizational adjustments must be undertaken, with leadership encouraging and facilitating cooperation. DevOps is fundamentally about empowerment and autonomy.
•  Many migration projects have generated measurable and anticipated outcomes with continuous testing, complete automation, and the application of modern software development practices of DevOps.
•  The goal of producing software more regularly, with less work, and fewer errors has been pursued by developers for many years. Finally, we have the methods and tools needed to make this a reality.
• As per a survey, organizations practicing DevOps generates a higher quality deliverables with greater deployment frequency and faster time to market. Hence, despite its challenges developing a DevOps is worthwhile, due to the increased satisfaction it offers to the developers, managers, and customers.

The cloud migration phase offers a big opportunity for organizations to improve processes, applications, culture and move towards adopting DevOps. It gives a chance to change something that is not beneficial anymore, stagnant and unnecessary. If your organization is going through the same phase, feel free to try the DevOps possibilities to bring that necessary change in your organization and witness the amazing benefits that come with it.

Do you have DevOps questions in mind? Contact us today and learn more about how we can help your company.

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