Modern enterprises deliver business services using Information Technology. They have to satisfy the customers to stay profitable and competitive. But the IT services, software, and systems also require maintenance and upgrades. Earlier, the companies would separate software development from IT operations. But contemporary needs led to the creation of DevOps philosophy, tools, and practices.
DevOps brings a company’s build and services teams together. In large enterprises, there will be thousands of employees and multiple IT groups. The Enterprise DevOps culture can put them on the same page to ensure business continuity. The products, best practices, and approaches get enlarged or scaled up to eliminate blind spots and deliver results within a time frame.
Significant challenges
A multi-national or retail giant enterprise deals with billions of dollars and huge daily inventories. Such an enterprise relies on agile techniques, end-to-end automation, and team collaboration. But there is a constant tussle between product and services groups. Yes, they use tools like Puppet, SaltStack, Chef, and Ansible to manage modules, configurations, and servers.
The fast releases, insightful feedback, and continuous delivery and testing are helpful. But, introducing new features with a high level of service standards is very challenging.
- Incident Control
New releases have to get carefully controlled to prevent problems and incidents. A modular process with a single channel can be helpful to manage every minute change. ITSM solutions like BMC remedy are useful for network services and application support teams. But the continuous deployment group may not be very happy.
- Approval Process
On-demand development with self-service deployments is enticing. But in large companies, the application teams have to go through advisory boards, approval, and governance gates.
- Lack of Automation
Heavy-duty software works in tandem with massive environments to ensure service reliability. Yes, the cloud infrastructure holds a lot of promise. But planning, preparing, and approving a new environment is a complex process.
- Orchestration
Large enterprises have to release new builds into multiple departments simultaneously. But such large-scale deployment requires orchestrating multiple, disparate teams to ensure efficiency. Also, robust policies and transparent standards are essential to enforcing full compliance along the existing or new chain of command.
Viable Solutions
Enterprise DevOps will succeed if there are standardization and automation of collaborative approaches. The work culture also has to get transformed through friendly, informal practices. Infusing AI technologies into both service and process management is also a viable strategy.
Data analytics and efficient communications are also necessary to achieve digital transformation. They assist in overcoming the organizational challenges through innovation and predictability:
1. Strategic Shifts
In traditional DevOps, the application development teams use tools like Puppet and Chef. They achieve exemplary configuration and deliver before the deadline. Besides, they raise the bar of automated builds by addressing the IT team requirements. The co-ordination activities, however, get handled with proficiency and promptness by the release managers.
Gradually, a systematic thinking practice emerges to reduce adverse effects. There will be a higher level of understanding of resilient product deployment and business continuity. Superior standardization in the automation of tools and approaches also comes forth. The disconnect due to individual pipelines and subjective DevOps interpretations gets further reduced.
2. Change Management
The business priorities, consumer market tastes, and technologies keep changing. If a business wishes to scale up to the level of Enterprise DevOps, change has to get efficiently managed. The requests, build, and release processes have to be transparent. They have to comply with the policy and adhere to all inter-departmental formalities. The old and new requirements have to get bridged dynamically.
The change also has to factor in innovative capabilities such as integrated tools, hybrid environments, and cloud infrastructure. Unlike DevOps, enterprise-level scaling maintains the developer and operation team interfaces. It just minimizes process-heavy interactions to speed up software delivery and release.
3. Risk Reduction
The Enterprise DevOps approach reduces various risks associated with large-scale releases. The teams adhere to common standards and make deadline predictions very accurate. The operations teams get entrusted with sophisticated tools to set-up complex environments and automation for everyone’s benefit.
They can supply a standard set of virtual machines (VMs) for the build. Also, the central IT team writes baseline scripts in Puppet and Chef. The application developers rely on them to speed-up software development for a specific server environment. They also ensure continuity to testing and staging while operation groups take the automation forward to the production environment. Thus, boundaries get crossed without compromising the overall control.
