The most effective
DevOps teams are the ones that have the mindset of keeping production stable.
One of the main challenges of a cultural transformation to DevOps is to make
everyone recognize that production is not just the responsibility of IT
operations but for the entire team. The whole team should have the main focus
and dedication to constantly keep
track of the live production status, and
to identify, rectify and fix any issues in production.
Matured DevOps teams
employ practices or processes to proactively identify any application slowdowns
or performance degradation of the servers in production and thus solve them
before the users are affected by them. These teams heavily depend on automation
practice thus reducing the mean time to recover (MTTR) to nullify the impact of
issues in production on the end users. Practices like Real user monitoring
(RUM), are used where actual user interaction with the application is monitored
to determine if users are being served quickly and without errors, and if not,
identify which part of the business process is failing.
Unlike traditional
organizations where IT and development teams have different backlogs and tools,
DevOps teams make use of a single prioritized backlog, unified development
tools, high quality agile development practices like version control, automated
quality, build are release.
A production first
mindset means that DevOps teams need to ensure all decisions made to improve
end users satisfaction is supported by the evidence and data gathered in
production. This demands a change in the mindset of the DevOps team members to
not fear experimenting. These experiments like A/B testing, canary releases
etc. help them to understand and evaluate changes to user experience and use
this information to plan future work and effectively prioritize the team
backlog. Making use of real application insights and user telementary for
proactive issue tracking, root cause analysis and triaging is deep rooted into
the way of working.
Because DevOps
requires a large change in operational
culture, technical processes, way of working and organizational thinking. It
requires focused investment in people, tooling and process. The DevOps cultural
movement should be aided by constant coaching and mentoring of people involved to
reach the goal successfully.
