Ultimate Guide – 5 Stages of DevOps Practice

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. What is DevOps?
3. Stages of DevOps Practice
   • The Technology Stack Normalization
   • Reduce and Standardize Variability
   • Scaling DevOps Practices
   • Automation
   • Provide Self-service Capabilities
4. Conclusion

Introduction

The most significant way to accelerate product iteration and application delivery under the DevOps model is by Combining development and operations teams. But, it’s not as simple as it sounds, its a tough road to travel. You must know that DevOps success often requires breaking down operational and cultural barriers before any work begins.

However, working with DevOps can get simple if a company becomes capable of figuring out the best way to navigate its DevOps journey. When things go as per the roadmap, the impact can be significant. This roadmap is also referred to as different stages, which is a systematic process of discovery, evolution, and automation that makes the DevOps process seamless.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is an evolving and one of the most advanced frameworks encouraging faster, better application development. It also helps deliver new or revised software features or products to customers more quickly.

DevOps practice stages encourage smoother, continuous communication, visibility, collaboration, integration, and transparency between their IT operations team (Ops) and application development teams (Dev) counterparts.

DevOps Stages help teams rapidly test and deploy the new technologies, as the same testing and deployment patterns are reused. According to DevOps experts, by creating a configuration management tool, teams will work together and adapt to managed DevOps services and culture.

Stages of DevOps Practice

1. The Technology Stack Normalization
   Normalization of the technology stack is the first stage of the process. Here, teams will adopt the accurate Agile methods and implement the proper version control to provide seamless continuous delivery and integration. This is also the stage where redundant technologies with no use throughout the journey are eliminated to make the stack normalized.This stage is not only the initial stage but also the most crucial one. To succeed here, practitioners must work on building a standard set of technologies and put application configurations in version control after successful completion.
2. Reduce and Standardize Variability
   In DevOps, both operation and development teams work for one common goal: Reducing variance. Working together for one goal helps both teams to ensure that process complexity is reduced, the tech is further consolidated to a single OS or OS family, and most importantly, early collaboration opportunities are explored.This stage is also crucial for two significant reasons-
   • • • The system configurations should be placed in version control.
       • Applications should be re-architected in case of business requirement or any software necessity.
3. Scaling DevOps practices
   Scaling DevOps practices to other departments and teams are needed after you have the basics in place from stages 1 and 2.This is crucial because when there’s a growth in communication and collaboration, the main focus of managed DevOps services automatically shifts towards improving application delivery and other service management. It’s true that when the IT department adopts DevOps practices, all other departments directly or indirectly linked to it will also start adopting DevOps.Moreover, scaling DevOps practices will eventually push more knowledge within the organization that further will help accelerate the overall improvement of the DevOps culture inside.
4. Automation
   Almost every organization gets stuck to this with one common state of confusion. This is: When to use the automation phase?The automation phase should come later in the DevOps journey for a seamless flow of application delivery and iterations. This is because the initial three phases are essential for the organization to begin automation. Moreover, automating the infrastructure in the fourth phase is easy once things are set right.The automation phase enables different self-service thinking in the departments and makes DevOps capable of adapting faster in the organization.
   
5. Provide Self-service Capabilities
   This is the last phase in the DevOps journey. At the end of Phase 4, you can assume that the departments are completely aligned with different DevOps practices. This is why the organization treats IT as a profit center that eventually supports the entire process.In this phase, the service delivery and incident management become automated, and the resources are provided to each department. Self-service turns into a culture that ultimately aims to enhance the overall DevOps adaptability for human resources and newer departments.
   

Conclusion

DevOps culture is the most advanced and effective way in software delivery as it brings both Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) in one frame. Well, that’s not limited, after knowing these 5 key phases of DevOps maturity you can now ace 7 different facets of your business: automation, organization, delivery, security, monitoring, testing, and operations.

So, step up your DevOps journey with these five key stages.