Digital transformation is at the center of the attention of companies and therefore of the market. The driving force for correct application adoption is the DevOps world, to be approached with correct and strategic consultancy.
The term DevOps, a contraction of development and operations, indicates a modern approach to exploit old and new skills, already in the company or even outside, to implement a highly automatic, resilient, agile ICT independent of individual suppliers.
But DevOps isn’t just that. It is a philosophy of a strategic kind, shaping today in view of tomorrow. The DevOps approach should be taken in a global sense, encompassing the lessons of cloud and data center, IoT and AI, collaboration and reskill. This is why real DevOps consultancy is often central to its adoption.
The path proposed by those who develop this activity requires the design of a set of pieces that redesign business processes, making them simple today and in future updates. Each piece must contribute to composing a complete picture, without which the component will not do its duty.
DevOps Consulting: A 6-Tier Approach
The model starts from an initial measurement of the degree of adoption of the DevOps philosophy of practices. Starting from this basis, Sorint is able to propose a path in subsequent steps to raise the overall level of DevOps.
To give an example of a complete path, let’s imagine that a new customer requests to modify their processes in a DevOps key. The path proposed by Sorint to the customer is iterative/incremental and unfolds in six successive steps:
- the first preliminary meetings take place, to understand the general lines of the approach already in place towards DevOps;
- an overall degree of maturity is identified;
- based on the degree of maturity found, a list of interventions involving conventional structures is proposed. Typically we work on three points: the development team, the operation team and the QA (quality assurance) team;
- detailed information is collected. We now interact at the individual group level, seeing in detail how developers develop, how releases are managed by operations and how release approvers work. It refines the degree of maturity in model adoption;
- a company-tailored action plan is prepared. One of its specific features is that none of the proposed changes blocks the pre-existing flow, always keeping the operation active;
- a list of real interventions is drawn up which will gradually be carried out.
An iterative and incremental model
It is clear that the goal of each new step is to lead to the next stage. There is no minimum level of adoption of the DevOps model: once it is accepted to enter this way of operating, real steps are activated which improve performance with each new iteration of the proposed cycle.
If you start from scratch, i.e. without any DevOps skills, the first step involves a training phase. If one already has a first degree of adoption, the adoption of best practices and the use of the best tools occur, conforming to the highest possible levels. If the degree of adoption is high, the testing or release phases occur and work is done on these.
If the quality is already high, SecDevOps practices can be introduced, which increase the safety built into the DevOps approach.
A relevant aspect is the separation of duties. Each operator must perform his task and only that, and the change in state of each task is marked. It is immediate to note that normal DevOps pipelines respect the segregation of duty and can document how versions and managers have followed one another over time.
Triggering SecDevOps on DevOps is one of the innovations proposed by Sorint to its customers.
DevOps consultancy that makes the difference
True digital transformation passes through a renewed architecture activated by innovative processes. The choice must therefore fall on companies that have already shown that they possess the skills for the complete cycle.
Sorint presents itself as a complete company, capable of transforming ideas into tangible and measurable results, regardless of the starting level of the transforming company.