transition to devops the reasons, methods, and results · transition to devops: the reasons,...

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Transition to DevOps:the reasons, methods,

and results

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https://itsvit.com/blog/2017-in-review-state-of-devops-adoptionhttps://itsvit.com/blog/2017-in-review-state-of-devops-adoption

Transition to DevOps: the reasons, methods, and results

The modern business has to rapidly adapt to the ever changing market conditions. Newtechnologies emerge daily, customers expect to receive more for the same cost and receive it assoon as possible, or you risk losing the competition race to a more technically agile marketplayer.

https://clutch.co/it-services/mspIT Svit company is listed among top-15 Managed Services Providers worldwide, according to the reputable business ratings company Clutch.co, based in Washington, D.C.

The move to using the latest technology to transform the stale business practices in order to innovate and deliver more value to your customers is known as the digital transformation, and DevOps adoption is the most important part of this process. Why so? Here are just some of the most prominent DevOps benefits:

https://itsvit.com/blog/starting-using-devops-enterprise-vs-startupshttps://itsvit.com/blog/starting-using-devops-enterprise-vs-startups

DevOps culture is built around joint efforts of the management, Dev and the Ops teams to reach the same objective: keeping the product relevant, up-to-date and well-performing to drive more value to the customers and ensure positive end user experience.

Applying the DevOps methods and practices allows to mitigate the risks of the software development and reduce the time to market for the product or its new features.

Transition to DevOps helps remove the waste and operational overhead as well as reducing the costs of operating the IT-infrastructure for any business, be it a startup, a small-to-medium business or an enterprise.

Efficient collaboration Streamlined operationsRisk mitigation

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https://itsvit.com/blog/devops-culture-huge-step-mankind/https://itsvit.com/blog/devops-culture-huge-step-mankind/

https://itsvit.com/blog/devops-culture-huge-step-mankind/https://itsvit.com/blog/devops-culture-huge-step-mankind/


https://www.leanmethods.com/resources/articles/top-ten-problems-faced-business/Based on our experience gathered through 12 years of development and operations, more than 600 successfully completed projects, as well as the publicly available research from other com-panies, there are 5 main issues faced by the modern small-to-medium businesses and startups:

We think that using the knowledge of modern technology in general and adopting the DevOps culture in particular is the most important part of the process, as it helps tackle the rest of the problems much better.

Uncertainty

Globalization

Innovation

Regulation and compliance

Technology

Running a business is always a risk because of the long list of uncertainties every entrepreneur has to face and overcome. We cannot precisely predict if the new product will be a success, and not a single marketing research will remove this uncertainty. We cannot predict the financial situ-ation in a year, what the credit policies will be then, how the political situation will affect the busi-ness, what new regulations will be introduced, what new technology will emerge, what features will your customers expect to get and how long it will take to provide these features.

Operating in the conditions of uncertainty








https://www.leanmethods.com/resources/articles/top-ten-problems-faced-business/

https://itsvit.com/blog/devops-culture-huge-step-mankind/

https://itsvit.com/blog/devops-culture-huge-step-mankind/


???

We can only assume with some degree of precision and adjust our plans as more details become available. The most common approach to dealing with uncertainty is replacing long-term strategy with short-term goals that can be achieved in sprints. However, such a move may result in losing the long-term vision.

“Inability to build a 5-years-long holistic strategy and line up the efforts to achieve the short-term goals according to this strategy — such inability might be the downfall of any business.”

Thus said, every company should find the way to operate in such uncertain conditions and devise the means to respond to drastically changing situation. While startups and small-to-medium businesses cannot influence the legislative initiatives of the government or the credit policies of the banks, they do have an important lever to reduce uncertainty in their arsenal.

The instrument for reducing the uncertainty is responding to customer feedback quickly and implementing the needed product/service features rapidly to remain relevant. This way the com-panies are able to meet and exceed the expectations of their users to bolster the brand advocacy and loyalty.









Operating with globalization in mind

“Your customers overseas want your product or service to be available at all times. You also want it to meet their requirements and exceed the expectations. For that you need to use the power of the cloud, both for 24/7 availability and never ending analysis of all relevant data.”

Serving one city or one country only is no longer a sufficient level of operations. To remain com-petitive and growing, the business should aim to operate globally, as the Internet allows the start-ups to offer their services worldwide. Such a benefit cannot be neglected if you aim to succeed. This means you need to consider multiple factors and devote significant effort to analysis of vari-ous data concerning your customers.

However, in order to operate efficiently on the global market, you need to be able to provide seamless and uninterrupted end user experience, with respect to the local culture, calendar and holidays, as well as other localization requirements









Operating with support of a constant innovation

You also must know their cultural preferences, consumer preferences, social needs to be able to provide a personalized offer at the best possible moment and hit the sweet spot.

Thus said, you customers from the other regions of the world might expect your product or service to work on your country state or religious holidays, and being operational 24/7 comes without questioning.

The common dilemma of any business is ensuring the stability and uninterruption of operations while providing constant influx of innovations. This can be quite a harsh task to accomplish, as the history of mobile banking and other applications implementation shows.

When the smartphones began to become ubiquitous, the banks and a multitude of businesses across a variety of industries understood their customers wanted to have instant access to their services.









“As the failure to comply results in a fee of 20 million Euro or 4% of annual turnover (whichever is bigger), we do not doubt youunderstand the importance of GDPR compliance.”

“It is impossible to imagine our modern lives without using mobile apps for payments, communication, entertainments and much more. Nonetheless, the process of their evolution was harsh and is littered with debris of businesses that were not innovative enough, produced poor apps with mediocre functioality and failed to deliver value to their customers.”

Social networks, banking accounts, booking services, games, online shops, etc. — all had to rapid-ly become available via simple and convenient mobile apps.

Nowadays, augmented reality, virtual reality, smart homes, machine learning and artificial intelli-gence products like smart speakers open the new frontier for innovation. The road to these new horizons will again be littered with the remains of startups, small-to-medium businesses and enterprises that failed to innovate and add new features to their products better and faster than the competition.

Operating under constantly updated regulation and compliance

One of the brightest examples of the challenge to operate under constantly updated legislative initiatives is the GDPR coming to effect at the beginning of May, 2018. All businesses dealing with the EU citizens and companies have to ensure the security of the information storage and processing, as well as implement the transparent practices and workflows for removing the stored data at the customer’s request, among other requirements.








How to deal with this challenge? The companies and organizations have to appoint an internal or external DPO (Data Protection Officer) that will facilitate the audit of the existing data handling practices, highlight the bottlenecks and issue recommendations on how to overcome them.

Operating using the latest technology

While most of the startups nowadays are cloud-native from the start, many small-to-medium or even larger businesses still face the transition to the cloud. If your company is 10+ years old, you most likely still operate your own dedicated servers, either locally, through colocation or rental in the datacenters. The workflows are polished, the operations are stable and everything seems fine.

The main part of the job involves ensuring the security of data storage and processing to guaran-tee the efficient replication, resilience to hacking and the easiness of removal upon the custom-er’s request.

GDPR









However, the problems like speeding up the release time of the new product features, shortening the time needed to fix the bugs, reducing the numbers of said bugs — all of these are impossible while using the stale technology. On the other hand, using the top-of-the-line technology and tools — AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, Jenkins, Gitlab CI, Prometheus & Grafana, ELK (EFK) Stack, Splunk, Sumologic — helps significantly shorten the time needed to get the job done, minimize the risks and reach the goals set.

“Just keep in mind, the tools alone will not do anything. The key point is for your team to adopt DevOps culture of collaboration and holistic approach to the workflow, when there is no siloed responsibilities, separate pipelines and department-specific tools. ”









Transition to DevOps: uniting the teams, changing the mindsetWhile the DevOps was initially considered to be merely the combining of Dev and Ops teams into a single structure, over nearly a decade of its existence it proved to be much more.

One of the most important results of transition to DevOps is building the cross-capable teams of engaged professionals, who can both develop the code and maintain it in production, gather the feedback and work on constant improvement of both the infrastructure and the product.

Without DevOps: split teams, split tasks, split goals

One of the distinctive features of the standard siloed Development and Operations practices are the divided responsibilities and split goals. The developers have to deliver new features to production at a steady pace, while the Operations engineers have to ensure stable uptime of the systems — and we all understand what a disaster can a buggy release be, leading to a prolonged service downtime, frustrated customers and missed revenues.

This is a direct result of two separated mindsets. Developers want to deliver the code within the time limit and close their JIRA Stories in time. Then they throw the code over the wall to the Oper-ations and QA to test, deploy and maintain it. The Ops have to provision and configure the testing environments for the QA specialists to test the code, and later they push it to update the existing production servers.









If (when) the bugs are found, the code is returned back to the development for the bug fixing and the cycle starts over again. Such ping-pong includes lots of waste — multiple waiting periods for all the parties involved, lots of effort, manual approvals and overhead. Sounds all too familiar, doesn’t it?

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DevOps approach: integrity and common goals


“DevOps is a practical implementation of a combination of Agile and Lean methodologies, backed up by the latest top-tier tech-nology, thriving in the atmosphere of communication andcollaboration.”

DevOps teams:

Build the immutable Infrastructure as Code in the cloud








https://itsvit.com/blog/2017-in-review-state-of-devops-adoption

Here are the main features of a DevOps workflow:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment

This way, instead of trying to blame the others, the DevOps engineers are motivated to constantly learn and evolve, improving the business efficiency, thus increasing the ROI and growing the reve-nues. This helps remove the operational waste, automate the routine tasks and free up the team’s resources to innovate, instead of firefighting.

https://itsvit.com/blog/starting-using-devops-enterprise-vs-startups

CODE

What’s even more important, the DevOps teams do not emphasize the personal responsibility of a particular part member for the failure. The common approach is “hey, we’ve found another system flaw, how do we make sure it does not happen again?”

The DevOps engineer is capable of assuming various roles — the developer, QA and operations engineer in particular. To say even more, the DevOps engineers follow the “you build it, you run it” mantra, which means they have a stronger incentive to do the things right, as they will be the ones to do the repairs if something goes awry.

Provide the Continuous Integration and feedback to drive more value to the customers

Ensure the Continuous Delivery of new product features and uninterrupted end userexperience








https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment

The environments are configured by versioned and easily adjustable Terraform orKubernetes manifests, so the development, testing, staging and production environments.

The containerized applications run in Docker and are launched in seconds, instead ofmanual configuration of each application.

The new product feature requirements are gathered throughout close communicationwith the end users, the product owners and the DevOps team, so the customers getexactly what they NEED, not what they think they WANT.

Automated unit tests are written before the code creation even begins. With time, thetesting codebase grows and the product code is efficiently covered by configurable andadjustable tests that can be reused multiple times.

As the dev, testing and production environments are identical, the amount of version-related bugs is minimized and the code works in the same environment throughout thesoftware delivery pipeline.

When it’s finally time to push the code to production, it is done through rolling updates,in-app updates that take place upon restart, or other unobtrusive methods that ensureuninterrupted end user experience.

When the new code is deployed to production, the next stage of the DevOps job begins,as they can monitor and log the performance of the production servers, answer thecustomer’s questions, solve the arising issues and gather the feedback. As the same teamis responsible for the delivery and maintenance of the code, they have a holistic view ofthe infrastructure and operations.

Monitoring and log data analysis helps the DevOps specialists identify the weak spots ofthe existing infrastructure allowing them to constantly improve the IT-infrastructureover time in order to remove the bottlenecks, reduce the costs and improve the reliability.

The immutable infrastructure is deployed to the cloud, so in case of any failure it can berebuilt in minutes.

The workflow is organized into automated pipelines instead of manual multi-stageapproval process.









Immutable infrastructure1

Identical environments & containerizedapplications

2

Continuous feedback integration3

Code development4

Automated testing5

Continuous delivery & uninterrupted enduser experience

6

Logging and monitoring7

Constant improvement of the IT-infrastructure8

Here is how using the DevOps methodology helps tackle the 5 main problems every business faces:

The DevOps workflow allows speeding up the release time drastically, so the feedback loops are really short. The customers get the desired improvements within days and weeks, not within months and years. This enables the businesses to better address the uncertainty.

1.

The DevOps tools can be cloud-agnostic, allowing the company to use the best suiting cloud services to provide their services to the customers worldwide. The businesses can go global smoothly and advance on multiple markets at once to achieve the globalization.

2.

Noone wants to use plain HTML now, because there are numerous CSS and JS frameworks that allow to build powerful web applications for multiple platforms (browsers, mobile apps). Ability to continuously innovate allows you to stay safe, follow the hottest trends, leverage the latest tools and the rapidly add the most popular features to your product.

3.









The tangible results of transition to DevOps as of 2017

https://itsvit.com/blog/2017-in-review-state-of-devops-adoptionhttps://itsvit.com/blog/2017-in-review-state-of-devops-adoptionWe have provided a brief overview of the Puppet report on the State of DevOps and the Atlassian DevOps survey in our article about the state of DevOps adoption in 2017. Below is the short list of the contents of that article. So, what benefits does transition to DevOps provide?

As for dealing with the compliance and regulations, working according to the DevOps best practices ensures security and stability of operations, as well as security of data gathering, storage, and processing.

4.

Last of all, if your company uses the latest DevOps and related technology, you will obviously have no problem in adding the latest technology to your toolkit!

5.

High-performing teams love automation.They do less manual work and have automated:









https://itsvit.com/blog/2017-in-review-state-of-devops-adoption/

The teams that adopted the DevOps practices are able to deploy new code to production46 times more frequently.

The overall length of the code delivery pipeline shortened 440 times.

If any failure occurs, the recovery time is 96 times shorter.

The number of bugs that made it to release is 5 times lower.

As DevOps adoption is mostly about the infrastructure management automation, this can save:

Using Docker containers to provision applications is one of the the foundations of the DevOpsworkflow, and the rate of Docker adoption in businesses of any scale grows annually. Forexample, as of 2017 every 4th AWS customer (24%, growing from 17,9% in 2016) leveragesDocker in production.

About 33% of time and resources spent on configuration management.

Around 27% of time spent on testing of the new code.

At least 30% of time devoted to the new code deployment.

About 27% of time spent on change approval, removing managerial and operational overhead

USING DOCKER IN PRODUCTION NOT USING DOCKER IN PRODUCTION

2016 2017

Docker Adoption in AWS









IT Svit results of DevOps adoption

Another important piece of modern IT operations is leveraging the serverless computing features like AWS Lambda. Its adoption grew 200% in just a year, from 12.3% in 2016 to 23.5% in 2017 and will undoubtedly continue, as more and more companies discover the benefits of this service.

Lambda Adoption in AWS

NOT USING LAMBDAUSING LAMBDA

2016 2017

76.5%

23.5%12.3%

87.7%

https://itsvit.com/our-solution/docker-selenium-codeception-jenkins-container

https://itsvit.com/our-solution/portable-ansible-aws-cli-kubectl-runtime-environment

As any company, IT Svit itself has passed through the DevOps adoption process. When we started providing the DevOps services, our developers faced the same issues we described above, so one of the most pressing tasks of the DevOps department was upgrading the workflows and defining the pipelines of software delivery to streamline our own projects. This has lead to the following results:

IT Svit DevOps team has released the Docker Jenkins Selenium Codeception container that has sped up the deployment of testing environments from 6-8 hours to 10 minutes!

1.

As infrastructure provisioning and operations shouldn’t be bound to a single workstation, we’re using a portable Ops runtime environment. This container helped cut the time needed to configure such a system 10 times and make the process error-proof!

2.









https://itsvit.com/our-solution/docker-selenium-codeception-jenkins-container/

https://itsvit.com/our-solution/portable-ansible-aws-cli-kubectl-runtime-environment/

https://clutch.co/it-services/msphttps://clutch.co/it-services/ukraine/leaders-matrix

https://clutch.co/it-services/ukraine/leaders-matrix

https://clutch.co/https://clutch.co/

https://clutch.co/profile/it-svit#reviews

Applying these DevOps practices and some other DevOps solutions developed by IT Svit team has led to outstanding results:

https://itsvit.com/our-solution/deployment-full-scale-elk-stack-kubernetes/

https://itsvit.com/our-solution/deployment-full-scale-elk-stack-kubernetes/Monitoring is nearly half the work for a DevOps team, and deployment of a full-scale ELK stack to Kubernetes was a much required service. Using Kubernetes and manifests, deployment time has decreased from 5 hours to 15 minutes!

3.


“They’ve come in under every deadline we've had. They're typi-cally done before we're ready for them to be done. That's been consistent throughout all the work they've done for us.”

Richard Campbell, CEO of The Network Cloud Company

We always deliver the new code on schedule or even ahead of it, as our customers point out in their independent IT Svit reviews to a reputable international business rating agency Clutch.co

1.

“I would suggest that, for anyone looking at working with them, do it. They’ll save you not just money but time. They’ll improve the quality of your work because they’re invested in it and per-form extremely well.

Richard Campbell, CEO of The Network Cloud Company

Our vast experience and in-depth understanding of the customer’s need allows us to pro-pose the best solutions for any case, allowing to save up to 30-35% of the budget.

2.












https://clutch.co/

IT Svit Customer Case Studies

We came up with a bespoke DevOps solution that included the following infrastructure design and an in-depth monitoring system.

One of our customers tasked us to deliver a resilient AWS infrastructure to ensure their enter-prise CMS product is production-ready.

Building a production-ready AWSinfrastructure for an enterprise CMS

This is just one of multiple 5-star reviews given by our satisfied customers. Such approach to business is one of the reasons IT Svit is amongst the leaders of the Ukrainian IT-outsourcing market and firmly resides in the list of top-15 Managed Services Providers worldwide.











https://clutch.co/it-services/msp

Bastionhost Redis

ElasticBeanstalk

Lambda

CloudFront

Application Load Balancer

Application Load Balancer

CloudFront

Elasticsearch

ASG

ASG

User









CMS showcase using AWS andKubernetes

This system provided the following results:

Another IT Svit customer wanted to create a jumpstart showcase for a CMS. As a product consist-ed of more than 100 modules written in Java and split into microservices, the setup process was a real pain for the customers. There also were around 15 processes communicating at any given moment, so the maintenance was also quite complicated.

We had a task to simplify the process and enable a CI/CD pipeline for it. We dockerized all the services, deployed them to a Kubernetes cluster and configured the CI/CD pipeline using Jenkins. Ansible was used as a main automation tool. The resulting architecture looks as follows:

Stable uptime, as the system is split in microservices running on several AWS instances.

90% faster TTR if any error occurs, due to in-depth monitoring system that not merely informs of the error, but helps determine its roots rapidly and fix it in no time.

Data redundancy, due to using our Terraform module for automated Mongodb backups.









https://itsvit.com/our-solution/terraform-module-automated-mongodb-backup/

User

NGINX

Frontend Backend

ASG

Application LoadBalancer

CloudFront

Relational DatabaseService

K8SCluster









https://itsvit.com/blog/resilient-aws-infrastructure-new-it-svit-projecthttps://itsvit.com/blog/resilient-aws-infrastructure-new-it-svit-projectOne of our customers needed a resilient AWS infrastructure including Neo4j DB to be able to leverage their product with utmost efficiency. We came up with the following system:

Building a resilient AWS infrastructure

A 3-command installation that shortened the deployment time from 3 hours to 15 min.

In-depth logging and real-time monitoring system with smart alerts.

Cluster auto-scaling capabilities.

This yielded the following results:









https://itsvit.com/blog/resilient-aws-infrastructure-new-it-svit-project/

User

Bastion

PublicSubnet

host Application Load BalancerCloudFront

S3PrivateSubnet

API

ASG

Elastic Block Store

Neo4j









Conclusions on transition to DevOps

https://clutch.co/profile/it-svit#reviewshttps://clutch.co/profile/it-svit#reviews

IT Svit has experienced the benefits of transition to DevOps firsthand and helped more than 600 customers achieve their business goals following the same approach. We have ample hands-on experience with IT infrastructure management and can satisfy even the unique specifications, which is proven by multiple reviews of our satisfied customers.

https://itsvit.com/contacts/https://itsvit.com/contacts/We would be happy to help you reach your business goals and we guarantee the quality of each provided solution. Contact us and let’s turn your ideas into successful business projects!

As you can see, IT Svit is experienced with developing complex and efficient DevOps solutions.

We achieved the following results:

Security due to modular infrastructure with limited access through a bastion host.

Scalability due to using CDN Cloudfront, S3 and ASG, along with the ability to flexibly scale the system components (DB and API) independently of each other.

High performance and resilience, as a failure of any single component will result only in rapid reboot of the module and will not impair the other components.










https://itsvit.com/contacts/

About IT Svit

We help industry-leading companies in the US, EU and worldwide innovate and overcome their challenges. IT Svit does this using enterprise-grade technology solutions to drive value and ensure business continuity. We pride ourselves on delivering great user experience and brand advocacy.

IT Svit specializes in DevOps services, Big Data technology, Machine Learning, bespoke Blockchain platforms, full-cycle services for startups, web development and QA.

https://itsvit.com/

transition to devops the reasons, methods, and results · transition to devops: the reasons,...

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