The document discusses the integration of cognitive services into DevOps strategies to enhance IT operations and software delivery. It outlines the benefits of adopting DevOps practices, emphasizes the necessity of collaboration between development and operations teams, and highlights the role of analytics in automating processes and improving service quality. The paper concludes with an assertion that leveraging predictive analytical tools within DevOps will lead to improved business growth and operational efficiency.

1. a t t e n t i o n. a l w a y s.
WHITE PAPER
Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
IT Infrastructure and Application
Support Services Director:
Ananth Krishnamoorthy
Author:
Sr. Analyst
Karthik Jaganathan

2. C O N T E N T S
Aspire Systems - Integrating Cognitive Services into your DevOps Strategy 2
What is DevOps?
DevOps Benefits
What is Cognitive Services?
Think Big: DevOps with Analytics
Real Power of IT Analytics
How IT Analytics tools can help IT Operations
Five Fingers Theory for DevOps Success
Conclusion
Statistical pattern analytics
Textual pattern analytics
Configuration analytics
Monitor your Pre-Production environment
Collaborate with Dev, Ops, Biz
Monitor the service and end-users post deployment
Understand the end-users
Hear from end-user needs and optimize the application features

3. In this paper we aim to explain about the possible benefits of adopting DevOps Practices with the best-in-class
Analytical tools (cognitive computing).
Why do we need DevOps in our organization? Well we may have expert team in software development,
Release management, QA and IT Operations. Is this really enough to deliver the product on time when we use
traditional agile software development approaches alone?
The answer is NO. In general, DevOps practice impacts major changes in IT culture and helps them in rapid
service delivery through the adoption of agile and lean practices with a fully automated lifecycle.
DevOps simply emphasizes people and culture, seeks to improve collaboration between the operations and
development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technologies, especially the major automation tools
that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a software development
life cycle perspective.
What is DevOps?
Aspire Systems - Integrating Cognitive Services into your DevOps Strategy 3
Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
Some of the key benefits when we adopt DevOps in our Organization.
DevOps Benefits
Test StageDev Production
Developer IT Operations
DevOps
Promote Promote Promote
1. Increased service quality
2. Increased reliability of service delivery
3. Increased customer value through responsiveness to change
4. Better usability with improved customer satisfaction
5. Efficient operations
6. Reduce bottlenecks through cross-pollination of skills
7. Holistic value creation increasing employee satisfaction
8. Collaboration improving employee attitude
9. Constant learning and improvement
10. Reinvigoration of your employees

4. Aspire Systems - Integrating Cognitive Services into your DevOps Strategy 4
Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
Source: Computer Associates, "Techinsights report: What smart businesses know about DevOps, "https://www.ca.com/us/register/forms/
collateral/techinsights-report-what-smart-business-know-about-devops.aspx, accessed January 3, 2014.
CODE
BUILD
TEST
DEPLOY
OPERATE
Innovates and
creates applications
Keeps infrastructure
running smoothly
THE DEV Devops disciplines The benefits of DevOps
Percent improvement in business areas.Integrate and automate processes.
THE OPS
Collaboration 23%
App Quality 22%
Customers 22%
New Services 21%
Time-To-Market 20%
Revenue 19%
Cost Savings 18%
Deploy Frequency 17%
According to a Forrester study, 39% of product development companies are releasing applications monthly
or more frequently. Another one-third 32% reported that their average release would be one per quarter,
while 27% reported that their average release would be one or two per year.
Thirty-Nine Percent Release Applications Monthly or More Frequently
How often does your team release applications?
Release many times per day
One release a day
One release a week
One release a month
One release per quarter
Two releases a year
One release a year
(or less frequently)
2%
3%
9%
25%
32%
21%
6%
39%
Base: 425 IT professionals involved in application development and delivery (percentages many not total 100 because of rounding)
Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft, June 2015.

5. Start
CI
Agile
Feedback
Coordination
Monitoring Live
Prioritising Story
1
Ready Process
Write Story Write Code
2
Scrum Process
3
Build Software
4
Provision
5
Deploy Software
6
Test Software
7
Go Live
8
1 2
3 4 -- N
AUTOMATED
CUSTOMER FACING
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Deployment
AUTOMATED
Quality Assurance
FeedbackLoop
DevOps
MACHINE
LEARNING
Aspire Systems - Integrating Cognitive Services into your DevOps Strategy 5
Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
What is Cognitive Services?
The main goal of cognitive computing is to create an Automated IT System that should be capable of solving
problem/providing solution without human assistance. It uses machine learning algorithms;
“39% of product development companies are releasing applications monthly or more frequently”
In general, a Cognitive service is a simulation of human thought process in a computerized model, also known
as cognitive computing.
These systems acquire knowledge from the data fed into them by mining data for information. The systems
refine the way they look for patterns and as well as the way they process data so they become capable of
anticipating new problems and modeling possible solutions. Cognitive computing is used in numerous artificial
intelligence (AI) applications, including expert systems, natural language programming, neural networks,
robotics and virtual reality.

6. Aspire Systems - Integrating Cognitive Services into your DevOps Strategy 6
Sales and demand are heavily time dependent. Sales fluctuation at different seasons of the year is one of the
hardest challenges for good forecasting and demand planning initiatives.
Over the last several years DevOps teams focused on automating the application delivery using a few
provisioning, release and automation tools. Now it’s time for DevOps team to automate the way we support
applications in production by leveraging application/software analytics and machine learning to automate the
manual tasks involved in incident detection, troubleshooting and root cause analysis. Very soon we expect to
see a new concept of Analytics- powered by DevOps and ITOA (IT Operations Analytics) tools that will help
deal with the actual challenges faced in DevOps by collecting and analyzing all the changes across entire
environments. Monitoring all actual changes and analyzing them together with release and deployment data,
will allow for smooth, error free releases. Think about a scenario, A person sitting in a remote location and
monitoring the complete delivery pipeline through an Analytics tool.
Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
Think Big: DevOps with Analytics
"Gartner recognized IT Operations Analytics as an area on the rise with high impact
on IT operations. So the analysts recognized that analytics will enable to perform
processes that will significantly increase revenues or cost savings for the enterprise."
Innovation
Trigger
Peak of
Inflated
Expectations
Trough of
Disillusionment
Slope of Enlightnment
Plateau of
Productivity
TIME
Expectations
IT Financial Management Tools
IT Workload Automation Broker Tools
Application Release Automation
Service Billing
DevOps
Business Service
Management Tools
Network Configuration
and Change
Management Tools
ITIL
Server Provisioning and
Configuration Management
Social IT Management
IT Service Support Management Tools
IT Operation Analytics
Software License Optimization Tools
IT Operations Gamification
Business Productvity Teams
Business Value Dashboard
ValueOps
Cloud Management Platforms
Capacity Planning and Management Tools
IT Service Catalog Tools
Enterprise Application Stores
COBIT
IT Process Automation Tools
Application Performance Monitoring
IT Service View CMDB
Rea-Time Infrastructure
Workspace Virtualization
IT Service Dependency Mapping
Configuration Auditing
IT Management
Process Maturity
IT Asset Management Tools
Service-Level Reporting Tools
Hosted Virtual Desktops
IT Event Correlation and Analysis Tools
PC Application Virtualization
Network Performance Monitoring Tools
Mobile Device Management
Client Management Tools
Infrastructure Monitoring
Network Fault
Monitoring Tools
Job-Scheduling Tools
Plateau will be reached in:
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years
obsolete
before plateau
Source: Gartner

7. Aspire Systems - Integrating Cognitive Services into your DevOps Strategy 7
By doing so, analyzing the detailed changes and validating the change configuration across the IT
environment (including application deployment) can help the IT Ops team to avoid below scenarios
As the complexity of the current infrastructure environment and operations process grows, without applying
the IT Analytics, we may lead to continually perform repetitive operations, time consuming tasks in order to
close these automation gaps.
Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
When using mathematical algorithms and other innovations, IT Analytics tools can carry out the calculations
that churn through these immense amounts of data and extract valuable information from tons of raw data.
Textual pattern analytics
Textual pattern analytics helps to analyze the
streams of textual data, such as logs. It can
also find patterns that can be used to identify
the conditions and behaviors.
Statistical pattern analytics
Statistical pattern analytics evidence the existence of relationships where explicit relations are either weak or
missing, statistically comparing performance patterns to identify common behaviors and therefore, implicit
relationships.
Configuration analytics
Configuration analytics can help to capture all
the change configurations across the IT
environments and analyze configurations to
detect what changes have been made when
the system was working fine. It also can help
to verify the change consistency between
environments and identify the discrepancies
from desired configuration.
Real Power of IT Analytics
How IT Analytics tools can help IT Operations
• Inadequate data of “Infrastructure Changes”, that fails to accommodate the gaps.
• Inconsistent production environment where the changes are made.
• Validating the pre-production environment, i.e. when the changes take place in the production and
operations, how do they get back-reflected into the pre-production environment?
“ITOA (IT Operations Analytics) tools will help deal with the actual challenges faced
in DevOps ”
Analytics Human Input
Decision
Action
Descriptive
What happened?
Diagnostic
Why did it happen?
Predictive
What will happen?
Prescriptive
What should I do?
Decision Support
Decision Automation
Data
Feedback
The Analytics Continuum
Source: Gartner

8. Monitor the service and end-users post deployment
Understand the end-users
Hear from end-user needs and optimize the application features
We should always want to monitor, especially in the production environment. If the usage goes
down/interrupted, we can identify the root cause for the same. If so then we should know whether the recent
deployment changed the behavior. By using some predictive analysis methods this can be auto-corrected
from the collection of raw data.
From the business perspective, analytics reports should help us to know, who our users are. Where are they
coming from? Are they using all the features? Does the performance have an impact on behavior?
It is always important to have feedback from end-users. End-users are the key partners for any organization to
strengthen our products/services. So the valuable feedback from customer/end-user can help us to optimize
the performance and add features to the applications.
Collaborate with Dev, Ops, Biz
Got an Issue? It is very important to have process and tools that foster collaboration between Dev, Ops and
business teams. It helps to make sure everyone is on the same page.
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Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
Five Fingers Theory for DevOps Success
Monitor your Pre-Production environment
In order to achieve the challenges/goals in the production environment, we should ensure that our
application must be tested and ready for the desired performance in the pre-production environment before
they go live in production. When using the analytical tools in pre-production environment, it triggers the
automated actions and reports the successful failures.

9. Integrating Cognitive Services
into your DevOps Strategy
Aspire Systems - Integrating Cognitive Services into your DevOps Strategy 9
ABOUT
ASPIRE
Aspire Systems is a global technology service firm serving as a trusted technology partner for its customers. The
company works with some of the world’s most innovative enterprises and independent software vendors, helping
them leverage technology and outsourcing in Aspire’s specific areas of expertise. Aspire System’s services include
Product Engineering, Enterprise Solutions, Independent Testing Services, Oracle Application Services and IT
infrastructure & Application Support Services. The company currently has over 1,600 employees and over 100
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We must adopt forward thinking DevOps with predictive analytical tools to help the organizations business
growth. The convergence of ITOA and DevOps will be an exemplary cycle of enhanced speed, smarter IT
automation, and have better control of IT operations for more reliable service and more successful customer
experiences.
Conclusion