Top Tips for Planning Your DevOps Strategy

New Thinking, New Focus

In recent years, there have been numerous articles published on the top DevOps trends. One of the elements I’m seeing repeatedly is around reducing complexity and providing end-to-end application and infrastructure lifecycle management solutions. A recent TechRepublic article listed 11 great tips for DevOps that will matter most in the upcoming year. Spoiler alert, the #1 DevOps trend was ‘Focus on end-to-end lifecycle management’.

“A focus on end-to-end lifecycle management will streamline DevOps workflow complexity”

Sid Phadkar, senior product manager at Akamai, said, “With the emergence of microservices and CI/CD toolchains, there has been an emphasis on developing and leveraging many different tools to tackle small tasks spread across similar parallel workflows. For example, two different teams within an organization often have their own CI/CD pipelines consisting of many different tools catering to version control, build automation, monitoring analytics, early testing, code review processes, and more. While organizations have reaped the benefits of catering to customized workflows, this has also led to incredible tool sprawl within often dispersed teams that can hinder productivity. DevOps vendors are often tasked with ensuring compatibility with tools from other vendors. The number of tools will continue to increase, but there will be a movement toward end-to-end lifecycle management and single applications that streamline tooling and workflows to ultimately improve software development speed and agility.”

Zeroing in on the Top DevOps Trend

We’ve seen customers struggle with this firsthand. Complexity can hinder the success of DevOps initiatives unless you consider moving towards end-to-end lifecycle management, where application and infrastructure delivery is streamlined and integrated into your tools. This is when you truly achieve fast, secure, and efficient application delivery. This is why End to To Lifecycle Management is one of the number one DevOps trends.

End-to-end lifecycle management is not just about the technology/tools you use… in order to deliver applications consistently, and at scale, businesses must consider skills, processes, and cultural changes to realize the benefits of DevOps.

With that in mind, you may want to consider the following, if you already haven’t:

• How are your tools integrated and working across business teams?
• Do you have the organizational processes documented and integrated to make it easier for teams to work together?
• Have you identified your top opportunities for improvement?
• Do you have the right deployment and lifecycle patterns identified?

Helping organizations solve these kinds of problems will accelerate their innovation and ultimately result in greater DevOps success. These are some of the reasons I’m truly excited and fortunate to be part of the ShuttleOps journey, as we make streamlined end-to-end lifecycle management a reality.