The Reality of Forming a Successful Unified Devops Teams
Anupama Rathi, AVP, Head of DevOps COE, Infosys
Anupama has nearly 3 decades of IT experience and leads DevOps practice for Infosys. With her rich experience in DevOps, she has helped many Infosys customers to scale their DevOps adoption to higher maturity.
The famous depiction of Dev throwing work over the wall to Ops is etched in the minds of early DevOps adopters. It showcased the need for merging Dev and Ops teams into unified DevOps teams to collaborate better for high-speed application releases. But, in reality, for almost a decade now, DevOps adoption has focused on engineering automation to develop CICD pipelines for applications. Thus, the creation of unified DevOps teams took a backseat.
In hindsight, it probably was the right approach for that period since, without end-to-end automation, the speed of releases was not high enough to demand a merged Dev and Ops team. By working in Agile iterations, the size of releases was cut down, but manual activities and handovers still resulted in longer release cycles. Multiple agile sprint cycles were then clubbed to form a final release. Essentially with no faster releases, there was no need for Dev and Ops to collaborate frequently, and hence the need to break the wall between Dev and Ops was not felt.
But with CICD automation and, in some cases, with extreme no-touch automation, the increase in speed of releases has become a reality. The frequency of releases has improved from once in nine months to once a week or even faster, on-demand. Such high-speed applications now have to take notice of the frequent Dev-to-Ops handover challenges to support the newer releases. There is pressure surmounting on Ops teams to maintain the same service levels in production despite the flux with frequent releases. This increasing frequency of application releases has made a strong case for unified DevOps teams. And we observe that more and more organizations are looking towards forming such teams for their digital applications at a minimum.
However, creating unified teams is not as simple as making Dev and Ops sit together across the table and calling them one team. There are some key considerations for forming successful unified DevOps teams.
Find out more about the challenges in forming a unified team and how to address those in this article featured in the French tier-one media - Solutions Numériques which is a publication of Numériques dedicated to topics around the digital transformation of enterprises – solutions, challenges, security and case studies. The website reaches +120,000 UMV and the print quarterly issue has a distribution of 19,500.
