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January 16, 2020
Topics: AWSAdvancedCloud Volumes Service for AWS
Most software-powered organizations have seen the light when it comes to DevOps. It’s not a hard sell, as DevOps culture and best practices have proven time and time again that it brings more stable software development to market more efficiently, effectively, and sustainably. Development and IT Operations teams partner to support each other, and in the end, customer satisfaction is higher. Everyone wins.
However, when software teams think about DevOps, it’s often in abstract terms of cultural movements:
- Improved collaboration across the organization
- Investing resources in automation to improve reliability and reproducibility
- Using metrics to fine-tune delivery pipeline
And these are all great ideas for posters and blog headlines, but what about the nuts of bolts of making it all happen?
DevOps Beyond the Pep Talk
It’s not hard to convince people of the benefits of a DevOps operation, but what can be a challenge is planning the actual organizational changes to get your DevOps initiative off the ground. Everyone may have the will to reach the DevOps promised land, but what you need is a DevOps guru to plot the course!
A great DevOps guru will possess the right mix of technical know-how, communication, leadership, and interpersonal skills. But let’s take a deep dive into how these characteristics play out when it comes to action.
Define Your Cloud Strategy
One of the beauties of realizing a DevOps framework in the cloud is that with the right service you can operate at the speed you need with a fully customizable storage environment and set of tools that support continuous deployment at scale.
We can all wax a little poetic when it comes to the cloud, automation, and infrastructure, but when asked questions about how exactly to implement the strategy, the answers get hazier. Here’s why: DevOps and a cloud strategy are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Nor should they be. No two organizations are alike, and the needs and demands of DevOps at any one organization are constantly evolving.
To meet this range of needs, a cloud service must offer not only high availability but also flexibility and high performance. It’s got to scale with the organization’s variable needs and operate at speeds that won’t throttle the development processes or deployment. NetAppⓇ Cloud Volume Services for AWS is fully customizable to match changing storage needs—and with speeds up to 20x faster than Amazon EBS, your DevOps teams can rely on performance similar to what they’ve come to expect from on-premises storage services for their most important mission-critical workloads.
Unleash the Power of Microservices with Automation
One of the great pillars of DevOps is automation, and with the arrival of microservice architecture, the ability to deploy applications at scale has never been better. Bring these advancements together and you’ve created a powerful platform for application deployment.
NetApp Kubernetes Service used with Cloud Volume Service is a match made in heaven for container-based architecture in the cloud. Everything from storage class creation and volume provisioning can be automated to meet the persistent storage needs of Kubernetes clusters.
Break Down Silos by Building Bridges
It’s one thing to talk about breaking down silos. It’s another thing to do it. The process of cultivating a DevOps initiative to support an integrated, inclusionary software delivery lifecycle can run into plenty of growing pains. But it’s precisely the growth mindset that will carry you through the hard times to that zen garden of effective, sustainable DevOps. Focus on the value of errors, using metrics to prompt change/not blame, remembering that constantly re-evaluating the toolchain is the nature of the beast—
Share Your Knowledge
As a DevOps guru, it’s not your job to manage every aspect of the production environment, but to give your people the tools to do so themselves. This bit is perhaps one of the most difficult parts of leading your DevOps initiative: at some point, you have to step back and let your teams shine.
Distributing decision-making roles throughout your DevOps team establishes a sense of ownership in the lifecycle and sharing your knowledge shrinks the skill gap in your organization. Besides, no one wants to get a call at 2 am because you’re the only person who can fix the problem. You can’t be an effective DevOps guru if you don’t give your teams the DevOps tooling and DevOp practices they need to solve their own problems.
Bring your Leadership Knowledge to the Guru Level.
Open the door to a transformative DevOps journey for your organization, your client base, and your career.
