Building a DevOps Organization and Culture

BUILDING
A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
BUILDING A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION AND CULTURE
A Whitepaper by RapidValue Solutions
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Building a DevOps
Organization and Culture
BUILDING
A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
index
01 Executive Summary
02 Achieving Increased Collaboration
through DevOps
04 Building a Successful DevOps
Team Structure
06 Adopting DevOps
07 The Change in Approach
09 Defining the Environments
10 Setting up Continuous
Integration Tools
10 Configuring the Continuous
Integration
11 Configuring Branch Management
12 Authors
12 Conclusion
08 Defining a Branching Strategy
©RapidValue Solutions

Building a DevOps
BUILDING
A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
DevOps has been the buzzword for the last couple
of years and enterprises, big and small have slowly
started adopting the practice. DevOps is the part of
an IT organization’s team responsible for creating
and maintaining the infrastructure. It can also be
described as a practice that addresses a holistic
view of the entire software delivery chain or the
product life cycle and considers account shared
services, facilitating continuous development,
integration and delivery. This is achieved by using
a set of tools that automate testing and streamline
the development process thereby, enabling
collaboration between the software development
team and the operations team. DevOps tools
enable teams to work more quickly and efficiently.
But are these tools enough to foster a collaborative
DevOps environment? The answer is no. DevOps
is more than just a practice. It requires a change
in the organizational culture. It requires a re-
assessment and re-alignment of how people think
about the overall business, their customers as well
as the teams.
Executive
Summary
Conway’s law states that organizations that design
systems are constrained to produce designs which
are copies of the communication structures of
these organizations. This means the structure of
your software is likely to reflect the structure of your
software development organization.
This whitepaper explains adopting
the DevOps practice and how
teams should be structured and re-
structured. It discusses in detail how
organizations can achieve increased
collaboration within the team
through DevOps. It also, describes
the different roles and responsibilities
of people involved in the DevOps
approach with real-world examples.
BUILDING
A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
1
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Building a DevOps
BUILDING
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ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
On one hand the development team delivers
new code as and when required, the operations
team on the other hand maintains the stability by
monitoring the changes and the frequency with
which the code is deployed.
In order to achieve increased collaboration, there
has to be a culture shift, not just within the team,
but at an organization level as well.
Achieving Increased Collaboration
through DevOps
Shared responsibility
If the development team works in silos, it is
possible that they show some disinterest in
the maintenance of a system, if it is solely
handled by a different operations team. It
would seem as if the development team’s
job is to code only and eventually, present
it on a platter for the operations team to
handle it. The development team can share
the responsibility of looking after a system,
which will help them to identify ways to
simplify deployment and maintenance.
This can be achieved through automated
deployments and monitoring. They will also
get additional insights from monitoring the
system in production.
Similarly, when the operations team works
closely with the developers, they are able
to understand the operational needs of a
system in a better way and implement and
adopt new automation tools and practices.
It is recommended to slowly move on from
the traditional process of handover and
sign-offs as it discourages people from
sharing responsibility. The developers and
operations team both, are responsible for
the success or failure of a system.
Autonomous teams
The concept of an autonomous team is
that the developers as well as the members
from the operations teams should be
able to make decisions without following
a convoluted decision making process.
The teams are able to work in a favorable
environment where there is no scope of
discrepancies. Instead of waiting for a
manual sign off for code to be deployed
in testing, you can rely on a version control
system which can easily be audited.
Without the need of a manual sign-off, the
team can automate the deployments and
speed up the testing cycle. This would also,
ensure that the team builds quality product
in the development process. The concept
of self-testing code also, allows regular and
low-risk deployments.
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Feedback
This aspect is extremely important in order
to continuously improve the collaboration
between development and operations
and to improve the overall system itself.
Monitoring how an application or a
system behaves in production creates an
environment of ownership and takes note
of potential improvement areas.
Source : martinfowler.comFigure 1 : Dev & Ops Collaboration
Team Culture
Organizational CultureNo silos
Autonomous
teams
Shared
responsibility
AutomationFeedback
Build
Quality In
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Building a DevOps
BUILDING
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Adopting practices that promote continuous
integration and continuous delivery is a key
enabler of DevOps within organizations. However,
organizations have to first build a DevOps team
structure that facilitates these practices in order to
be successful.
In order to establish a successful DevOps culture,
we need to follow the steps mentioned below:
Building a Successful DevOps Team
Structure
Assemble the right resources for
the DevOps team structure
01
The DevOps Evangelist
This person promotes the benefits of
the DevOps approach by identifying the
business benefits that an organization sets
to gain by implementing it. He/she is also,
responsible for being the change agent
who identifies the key roles and gets the
development, as well as the operations
team on board and ensures that these
resources receive the necessary training to
make required changes.
“DevOps represents both a
technology and a culture
change. The most common thing
people get wrong is attempting
to address the twin silos of Dev
and Ops by creating a third
silo, DevOps, without giving any
thought to the wider context.”
- Martin Croker
Managing Director, Accenture
Techbeacon has identified seven different
roles that are important for any organization
looking to implement DevOps practice.
Automation Architect
This person is responsible for designing,
implementing and analyzing continuous
deployment strategies. There is a need to
ensure high availability of the application
on production and pre-production systems.
Release Manager
This person is responsible for managing and
coordinating the lifecycle of the product,
from development through production.
He/she is also, responsible for creating
and managing the end-to-end application
delivery tool chain.
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Security Engineer
In DevOps environment, the security
engineer works in parallel with the
developers to ensure that his/her
recommendations are taken into
consideration much earlier in the process
rather than towards the end.
Experience Assurance Professional
The traditional QA takes on this role in a
DevOps environment wherein, the focus of
the tester is functionality testing and user
experience testing.
Software Developer/Tester
The role of a developer now is quite
different from what his/her role was as
per the traditional approach. In a DevOps
environment, the developer is not just
expected to write code but also, responsible
for unit testing, deployment and ongoing
monitoring of the application.
Utility Technology Player
This is a person who can operate effectively
across different platforms, tools, networks,
servers and databases. The person has
expertise in multiple areas, adept at
collaborating across disciplines and has
the ability to apply knowledge in areas of
expertise other than his/her own.
These roles can vary depending on the kind
of organization and the kind of product
that is being built. It is important to have
communication and collaboration among
the team members in order to deliver a
successful product.
Business goals should be aligned
Even though a team has been setup,
an organization should not make
hasty decisions with regard to the
implementation of DevOps practices.
A company’s business goals must be
aligned with the team’s setup. The
vision of the company must align with
the objectives of the DevOps team.
This will instill a sense of purpose in the
minds of the team members wherein,
they will not just be working on a
particular project or task but will have
the organization’s business objectives in
mind while implementing their strategies.
02
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Measure the effectiveness of
the approach
There should be key performance indicators
in place to closely monitor the effectiveness
of the team structure, roles and the tools
selected. Some examples of performance
indicators could be: measuring the number
of deployments happening per day,
whether the security or quality standards
are being met or not, the volume of errors
and bugs reported and how efficiently they
are being handled.
04
Adopting DevOps
In earlier days, successful deployment of
applications was a lengthy process. Once the
code had been checked in to the code repository,
the developers themselves used to build the
1. Development team creating the build
• Development team tends to include last
minute fixes also, to the build, thereby,
breaking build in higher environments.
• Chances of deploying partially developed
code.
deliverable in their local system and then the
package was shared with the operations team.
For operations team to deploy a package, a service
request/ change request would have to be initiated
in the change management system, and then
requests for approvals were sent to the business,
operations, etc. Once all approvals were in place,
the operations team would validate the package
and schedule deployment for the next day. The
package was shared via a shared location such
as FTP. During the deployment, someone from
development team had to be available to assist
in case any issues came up during deployment.
The development/ QA team then had to verify the
deployment and inform the stakeholders about
the successful deployment. The entire process was
time consuming and the chances of occurrence of
errors were too high.
Below is a summary of the limitations of the
existing process:
Adopt suitable tools
Organizations that are looking to
implement DevOps and trying to achieve
continuous integration and delivery
through automated testing and continuous
deployment have a plethora of automation
tools available in the market. It is extremely
important to identify the set of tools that
align with your setup and your team
structure.
03
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Building a DevOps
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DevOps (Development and Operations) evolved to
overcome the limitations of the above process and
to speed up the overall delivery time. One of the
key factors for the quick adoption of the DevOps
strategy is the emergence of Agile development
methodology which required deployment of
production ready code in every 2 weeks.
3. Assistance during deployment
• During deployment, the development team
has to be available on call to assist operations
team in case of any issues.
2. Creating ticket for operations team
• As operations team has to deploy for every
team, each team has to wait for 24 to 48 hours
for deployment.
• As operations team manually deploys the
application, there are chances of missing steps
resulting in error.
4. QA - limited control
• QA team does not have much control as the
package creation and sharing is done by the
development team. Therefore, QA cannot
assure that the verified package is getting
deployed to higher environments.
The Change in Approach
The term DevOps means “Development and
Operations” i.e. both development and operations
happen simultaneously, instead of happening is
silos. The key features of DevOps are Continuous
Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI / CD).
Continuous Integration means that the completed
and unit tested code is integrated to the
repository continuously, while verifying the quality
and completeness of the integrated code by
performing build, test case execution, code quality
analysis, etc. Continuous Delivery means that the
merged code is continuously deployed to the
environment automatically at pre-defined periods.
The CI/CD pipelines ensure that quality code is
available in the repository all the time and that
the latest available code is deployed to the testing
environment. The branching and merging strategy
can also, be integrated with the DevOps strategy so
that the merging of code to higher environments
can be performed via the continuous integration
tools itself.
Following are the key steps for implementing a
DevOps process:
•• Defining a branching strategy
•• Defining the environments
•• Setting up continuous integration tool
•• Configuring the continuous integration
•• Configuring continuous deployment
•• Configuring branch management
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Defining a Branching Strategy
For implementing the DevOps process, first the
whole team (Development, QA, Product Owner
and Scrum Master) discusses and finalizes a
branching strategy. The branching strategy and
the environments are closely coupled and can be
mapped to each other respectively, in most cases.
The basic branching strategy for a typical project
consists of three branches: Develop, Release, and
Master.
1. Develop
All development activities take place in this
branch. Ideally, a separate branch will have to
be created for each user story and it needs to
be reviewed when merged to Develop branch.
3. Master
Once the code is deployed to production, it
is merged from the tagged release branch to
the Master branch.
2. Release
This is the branch where the testing/QA is
performed. A versioning strategy is followed
to name the tags in the Release branch.
Semantic versioning is the commonly used
versioning convention. Once the changes are
merged to Release branch, a tagged version
is created which will be used for further
deployment and testing.
Start of sprint
Sprint progressing
QA completed, deploy to
production
Stories completed/ Testing
started
Deployed to production
Master
Branch
Develop
Branch
Release
Branch
Figure 2 : Defining a Branching Strategy
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Defining the Environments
The environments usually, complement the
branches. Corresponding to each branch, there
will be an environment where it will be deployed.
There can be other environments, depending on
the need, like staging environment, performance
test environment etc. that can have different
branches or can connect to existing branches.
1. Development/integration environment
Applications are deployed from the
Develop branch. In some scenarios, the
developers’ local machine is considered
as the development environment and a
named server based environment is used as
an integration environment, where all the
different components can be integrated and
tested. In both cases, the code from Develop
branch is used.
3. Production environment
The code once merged to Master branch
is the production code. The production
environment always runs the application in
the latest Master branch.
2. QA/test environment
The versioned application from the Release
branch is deployed here. The QA team
performs testing in this environment.
Deployment Environment
*.domain.com Production
QA
Development
*.qa.domain.com
*.dev.domain.com
Code Repository
Master Branch Where production
code resides
Release Branch
Develop Branch
Where features are
QA tested
Where features are
being developed
Figure 3 : Defining the Environments
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Setting Up Continuous Integration Tools
Jenkins is the most popular and commonly used
continuous integration tool across industry. It can
integrate with multiple source repositories like Git,
SVN, etc and also, has plugins for integrating with
variety of systems/tools. Jenkins can be installed in
a standalone machine or can be installed on cloud
instance. Alternatively, there are Jenkins services
available which can be directly used as containers
where in Jenkins image can be deployed.
Once installed, the Jenkins UI can be accessed
over the browser and all the configurations can be
performed via the UI.
Configuring the Continuous Integration
There are many different ways to configure Jenkins
to perform continuous integration. Below are
some of the key methods:
Jenkins can be configured to deploy applications
to servers directly such as weblogic or can also,
be configured to deploy to cloud-based instances
[Azure, AWS].
Once the configurations are done, when the
source code is committed by any developer, the
build job is triggered automatically. It performs
all the analysis, creates the deliverable and sends
out an email to all the users about the build status
[success / failure].
•• Creating job to checking out from source
repository (SVN, GIT).
•• Trigger the build job so as to trigger build
when code is committed.
•• Invoke source code analysis – for static code
analysis (SonarQube).
•• Invoke unit test and integration testing – for
test verification.
•• Invoke coverage tool for coverage report.
•• Create the deployable deliverable (jar, war) and
add to repository.
Below are the key steps for performing continuous
integration.
•• Creating separate job for deploying to an
environment.
•• Configuring periodic jobs for deploying to an
environment.
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Configuring Branch Management
Branch management is an optional feature of
DevOps. It helps to avoid issues like developer
directly committing code to QA/ Release branches
for fixing bugs identified in QA, thereby, introducing
more bugs. Branch management via DevOps will
allow much better process and help to avoid bugs
related to commit, merge, etc.
A simple branch management process is
described below:
•• Developer creates branch for his own user
story.
•• Once development is complete, the developer
creates a pull request to merge the code to
Develop branch.
•• Team lead performs code review and then
merges the code to Develop branch.
•• Automated build is triggered that verifies that
the committed code is as per standard and no
features are broken.
•• Once all features for that sprint is committed
to Develop branch, QA triggers the Release
branch job in Jenkins, which will merge the
code in Develop branch to the Release branch
and a tagged version will be created. (Ex -
release_1.2.0).
•• QA now triggers the deployment of the above
tagged branch to the QA/test environment.
•• If bugs are identified in QA, then the developer
takes a copy of the Release branch and creates
a new branch for the defect. The defect fixes
are then committed. This will be merged to
the Release branch and a new tagged version
will be created (release_1.2.0_1). This is also,
manually merged to Develop branch by
developer.
•• Once the QA testing is complete, the tagged
version is deployed to production and the
code merged to Master.
Following are the advantages of using this
approach.
•• Developers will have ‘write’ access only to
Develop branch and ‘read only’ access to other
branches, thereby, limiting issues related to
late commits.
•• QA will be responsible for merging code to
QA/Release branch and for deploying code to
QA environment, thereby avoiding non-tested
code getting released to customers.
•• Code commit always follow the Develop –
Release – Master process thereby, avoiding
conflicts in Release/Master branches.
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Conclusion
An organization will face many challenges while building a DevOps team structure. There can be
problems related to collaboration and communication or with building assets that can be reused
within the organization across different projects. An approach that has been suggested by the
experts in the industry is building a Centre of Enablement, which basically defines the way in
which teams should be organized and processes should be followed.
There is a lot to gain from implementing a DevOps strategy and team structure in the long run. A
good start for any organization would be to bring in more collaboration across different functions
and a sense of shared responsibility in order to derive more quality in our deliverables.
If you’d like to know more about
DevOps, please reach out to us at
contactus@rapidvaluesolutions.com
Authors
Jaison Joy
Saumil Sharma
Software Architect
RapidValue
Business Analyst
RapidValue
BUILDING
A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
BUILDING
A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
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Building a DevOps
BUILDING
A DEVOPS
ORGANIZATION
AND CULTURE
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©RapidValue Solutions March, 2018

Building a DevOps Organization and Culture

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