Winning in the Continuous Delivery (CD) World – DevOps 101

Accomplishing Continuous Delivery (CD) necessitates engineering discipline and collaboration to automate the delivery pipeline from code commit to production. Technical professionals can use these steps to achieve CD regardless of where they are on their agile and DevOps journey.

Steps to Master in CD :

1. Create a continuous learning Culture:

Implement continuous learning practices for streamlining work and reducing waste to deliver CDs of high-quality solutions:

• Examine the team’s capabilities and identify gaps in knowledge, skills, processes, or practices.

• To support organizational learning and provide critical opportunities for expertise development, create communities of practice.

• Adopt practices and processes that promote continuous learning.

2. Improve agile fluency:

• Establish baseline metrics to check if you are making progress toward your goal.

•Deploy agile methodologies to educate and train the team to implement agile practices.

•Use bimodal IT to avoid bottlenecks and reduce reliance between Mode 1 and 2 teams.

3. Smart, agile practices:

As you progress toward a mature agile implementation, focus on the following two areas:

• Agile technical practices provide the insight and guidance needed to help build quality into an application while receiving continuous feedback on its readiness for production deployment.

• When developing new applications, use a componentized architecture, and refactor legacy applications to fully benefit from the agile and DevOps practices required for the CD.

4. Automate Infrastructure:

The pressure on development, security and data management, and infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams to deliver solutions faster is increasing. The days of waiting for someone to build and configure an environment for days, weeks, or even months are long gone.

As it extends agile values and practices, DevOps aids those teams in increasing the frequency of application updates. DevOps teams that succeed, on the other hand, must be able to:

• Set up tooling to assist development teams and I&O teams in managing and supporting new architecture.

• When it comes to implementing and managing your applications, deploying and managing is the way to go. There are numerous questions to ponder, including: Should we use containers? How do we deal with them? Do we plan to move our applications and databases to the cloud?

• Securing Data is still one of the crucial tasks for security personnel. Protecting your mission-critical assets has become more difficult due to the increased speed of change and the migration of applications and data to the cloud.

• Application performance monitoring is required to provide rapid quantitative feedback on the efficacy of the latest release, as DevOps-oriented lean and agile practices become more widely adopted. Data must also be available to support rapid triage of performance and availability changes associated with more frequent production updates.

5. Increase delivery cadence:

When technical professionals reach this stage, they should consider several advanced topics. The topics, on the other hand, necessitate mature agile development and DevOps practices to ensure success:

• The goal of agile enterprise frameworks is to make complex agile releases and evolving solutions feasible, routine, and sustainable.

• MSA creates distributed applications deployed on-premises or in the cloud and supports agile delivery and scalability. MSA changes the way development teams design and deploys the implemented software.

Reference: 5 Steps To Master Continuous Delivery (gartner.com)