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Accelerate delivery and operation of high-quality, reliable software

DevOps encourages a collaborative, technically-empowered ‘new way of working’ that enables teams to move at the speed of rapidly-changing and evolving business landscapes.

Through automation and focusing on building quality in, DevOps reduces the risk of delivering software at the speed of innovation, while operating it with improved security and stability.

Look through the lens of the DevOpstician

As DevOpsticians, we approach DevOps engagements by peering into organisations through a variety of lenses. It's also how we educate attendees of our ICAgile-certified Foundations of DevOps course...

FLOW

This lens highlights how value moves through development to delivery. It looks for bottlenecks, manual processes that can slow and hinder flow of value. This lens looks to automate repeatable processes.

FEEDBACK

This lens is used to determine how information is shared across the enterprise. This lens looks for concise, actionable quality feedback to be delivered to relevant parties.

CULTURE

This lens looks at the workplace of the team members involved. It looks for cultural mechanisms that encourage responsibility and creativity as it pertains to the delivered product.

ORGANISATION

This lens looks at the structure of an organisation of team. It looks for cross-functional teams that can switch roles or context to ensure the job is done. It looks for empowered, transformational leadership that is willing to invest in and encourage team members in their growth.

QUALITY

This lens looks at how a team ensures quality in a delivered product. It looks for a "shift-left" mentality that ensures the quality in built artefacts as soon as, if not before, they are actually created.

TOOLS

This lens looks specifically at which tools are being used in a organisation. It ensures tools are being used to optimise the delivery of value and quality to the end user. It looks for tools that are not being used correctly or are unsupportable by the organisation.

Your DevOps change journey

Deciding on how to start a DevOps change journey can be a daunting prospect. Our free eGuide, written by Peter-John Lightfoot, lays out the key areas, actors and activities that should align for successful change, along with some pragmatic approaches for change in the various roles that might collaborate.

DevOps eGuide

Empowering teams

Your competitiveness increasingly depends on the people who deliver technology. By removing the blockages that get in their way and empowering them with end-to-end responsibility for delivery, you’ll be fast to market with the quality products your customers need. DevOps empowers people to deliver value fast. And continuously.

The four principles of empowerment

1

Open Information

ensuring the team understands the business goals at a macro and project level opening up visible business, delivery and technical metrics, monitoring and logs

2

Autonomy

assigning clear responsibility with authority to act to deliver the business goals  making the team responsible for end-to-end delivery, production support, technologies and tooling

3

Self-sufficient

providing the ability to make decisions, communicate rapidly and remove impediments  encouraging flat-structured, cross-functional teams, made up from the business and all technical areas touched on by delivery

4

Learning and Innovation

structuring for continuous improvement, making it safe-to-fail and encouraging experimentation growing internal capabilities and making external knowledge, skills and experience available

For more on the Pillars of Empowerment, see this article by Chris Pollard

A Continuous Delivery ‘eco-system’

These four Pillars of Empowerment are the glue in a Continuous Delivery ecosystem connecting people, process and technologies to deliver maximum value.

People

organisation

Cross-functional delivery teams

DevOps teams consist of people right across the value chain. Delivery teams are self-organising, empowered by leadership and free to create the highly collaborative culture which motivates engagement. Because of this DevOps is more likely to create happier and super-productive teams.

Mindset

Lean

Lean is about reducing waste, being responsive, adaptive and pragmatic. By default DevOps is lean by default and reduces the waste in traditional, siloed delivery environments including: noise and complex interactions at the interface of Dev and Ops; repetitive tasks that should be automated; difficulties in scaling production environments; excessive time taken to discover and respond to issues in production because of lack of visibility; and flaky environments.

Process

APPROACHES

Agile software delivery

Agile is fast becoming the default approach to software delivery because delivering value in small increments, frequently, is a prerequisite for competitiveness in today’s environment. DevOps maximises the benefits of Agile by making operations an integral part of the delivery process and extending the team’s responsibility to include deployment.

PRACTICES

Automate and elevate feedback

DevOps implements innovative technical practices that streamline the development, testing and deployment of technology. It automates the repeatable to create consistency, speed and predictability. This in turn helps minimise risk, improves the transparency and auditability of processes. It also elevates feedback by creating feedback loops that allows teams to maximise the value they deliver. Build>Deploy>Measure>Learn. Rinse and Repeat.

Tech

Tools

Tools that empower teams

Tools exist to cover every aspect of delivery and operation including build, deploy, checking, release, version control, configuration management, orchestration, infrastructure provisioning, performance monitoring and AB testing. The ever-increasing DevOps toolset enables and empowers teams to deliver and improve.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Scalable platforms

Deploying technology fast and automatically in the Digital Age requires suitable self-service infrastructure to create and scale environments. Scalable platforms and live-view production environments allow easy, super-fast provisioning and management of the system by the team.

CloudBees create a buzz in Wellington

Kohsuke Kawaguchi shares his thoughts on the past, present and future direction of Jenkins.

Michael Neale presents Jenkins X, an opinionated platform for developing and delivering Kubernetes-based applications.

Embrace the change that Continuous Delivery creates

Hosting Gojko Adzic

Gojko Adzic's talk on how to turn Continuous Delivery into a competitive advantage, focused on how it creates a fundamental change to the world around software teams. He states that to ignore these changes is dangerous – while embracing them opens up significant business opportunities.

Technologies

Our team provides education, coaching, consulting and implementation services for a range of platforms and tools, including these from our partners...

CloudBees

Every business is a software business and is under pressure to innovate constantly. This increased velocity introduces new business risks. CloudBees is building the world’s first end-to-end automated software delivery system, enabling companies to balance governance and developer freedom.

PagerDuty

PagerDuty improves the operational excellence of organisations by helping teams make sense of their monitoring alerts, enabling them to respond faster with greater accuracy.

Sumo Logic

Modern, distributed systems can be a challenge to operate and understand. Sumo Logic solves this problem by providing a platform to collate, analyse and react to signals in your machine data. This helps you make data-driven decisions and reduces your time to investigate security and operational issues.

Chef expands its horizons

In May, I attended the Chef Conference (‘ChefConf’) in Chicago during which there were exciting announcements describing how Chef is focusing on more...

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Some of our DevOps team

Michael Harrod

Senior Consultant

AUCKLAND

Chris Pollard

Principal Consultant

WELLINGTON

Allen Geer