The transformation from a traditional software development methodology to DevOps can be a complicated road. Not only are you making a dramatic change to how your teams develop and deploy software but you’re also changing the entire culture of business operations. If you don’t spend plenty of time planning this shift, things can go wrong.
Or, maybe you’ve already implemented DevOps and are finding that it’s not going nearly as smoothly as you assumed it would. Your teams aren’t collaborating, automation isn’t working, and deadlines are being missed.
So much can happen when there are so many moving parts.
Fortunately, there are ways you can make positive changes to your DevOps methods that can not only ease the overwhelming stress that can come with such a dramatic change but also help make DevOps far more effective.
One option that can positively affect DevOps is to implement Site Reliability Engineering. It may sound like a stretch, but bear with us and you’ll see how this can apply.
For instance, BairesDev did a recent project with a client that operates the largest truckload freight marketplace in North America. BairesDev partnered with the client’s Platforms Engineering group to build both DevOps and SRC functions and provide them with over 30 resources to modernize and streamline their software delivery pipeline. This was an urgent priority for the company, and we were able to provide the necessary platforms, tooling, and services to their Analytics, Mobile, and Data teams to greatly simplify their process with the help of Site Reliability Engineering.
What is Site Reliability Engineering?
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a set of principles that applies various aspects of software engineering to traditional IT operations. SRE aims to create reliable and scalable software systems, and even though it isn’t a 1:1 comparison to DevOps, many of the principles do apply.
With SRE, there are 7 guiding pillars, each of which can be applied directly to DevOps for a much-improved workflow.
Embracing Risk
No service is 100% guaranteed, and nearly all consumers, customers, and clients understand this. Simply put, risk is inherent in software development and business in general. When a company avoids risk, they also avoid the rewards that come with risk. When you embrace risk, you greatly improve the chances that your developers and IT operations can create something that will vastly outperform or outsell what you’ve previously deployed or released.
With regard to DevOps, risk is implied, and if you refuse to embrace it, you’ll find DevOps to be far more challenging than it should be. When you (and your teams) open yourself up to risk, you will find that the DevOps methodology is not only easier to employ but also easier to grow and improve. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that when you apply this principle to DevOps, it’s imperative that your teams also understand that along with risk, there is also safety and security, and they will not be punished when risk goes wrong.
Service Level Objectives
It’s important to have objectives. But with SRE, it’s also crucial to employ what’s called Service Level Objectives (SLO). SLOs are directly tied to customer satisfaction and should be an important key to any business. When you consider customer satisfaction and apply it to your objectives, it can radically change how you do things.
Remember, the customer is a central component of your business, and without them, you would struggle to survive. The old adage “the customer is always right” can now be seen more along the lines of “customer satisfaction drives innovation.”
You must always be thinking of how you can improve customer satisfaction, and this directly applies to DevOps because DevOps should already be a key component to growing your business to serve the customer. You want to be able to scale to meet demand, roll out features to improve customer experience, and be capable of addressing issues that directly affect customers with expedience.
Eliminating Toil
This principle should be fairly obvious as to how it applies to DevOps. Eliminating toil means stripping away repetitive work that can bog down teams. When your engineers have to deal with simple, repetitive tasks, they are prevented from doing what’s truly important: focusing on development and operations.
DevOps is perfectly primed to eliminate toil with the addition of automation. With automation removing those repetitive tasks, DevOps should run more smoothly. Your engineers are then capable of not only keeping everything running as expected but also developing new features for software and even improving the software development lifecycle that helps drive your company.
Monitoring
If you’re not closely monitoring your DevOps workflow, you’re missing out on having key insights into how everything works and how things could be improved. The monitoring of DevOps (with a nod to SRE) is all about carefully viewing the data your systems produce and making key decisions based on that intel.
The information you glean could not only help to improve the entire DevOps workflow but can also go a long way to save your company money and even make everyone’s job considerably easier.
The four most important pieces of information you’ll want to monitor are latency, traffic patterns, errors, and service saturation.
This principle cuts to the very heart of DevOps.
Release Engineering
This is another principle that should be obvious in how it’s applied to DevOps. Release engineering is all about deploying software in such a way that is consistent, stable, and repeatable.
To the point, release engineering must take into consideration these elements:
- Configuration management – developing a standard by which releases are configured.
- Process documentation – the creation of documentation for each and every release.
- Automation – the automation of mundane, repeatable tasks.
- Rapid deployment – iterate quickly and frequently instead of going with the traditional software deployment method.
- Testing – must be continuous and reliable.
Automation
Another principle that is absolutely key to DevOps is automation. Within the world of DevOps, there are plenty of areas where automation can be employed, from builds all the way to releases.
As automation makes your DevOps workflow more reliable, it also removes a lot of mundane tasks that are traditionally assigned to both developers and IT operations. The more these tasks can be automated, the more positively they will affect your DevOps methodology.
Simplicity
Although DevOps is a very complicated and challenging method of software deployment, any chance you can get to simplify things will help improve the entirety of the workflow.
Instead of designing and developing overly complex systems, you should place simplicity at the heart of everything. Remember this: when complex systems break, the fixes are almost equally as complicated. On the contrary, when a simple system breaks, the fix is usually fast and easy.
If you can re-imagine your DevOps workflow with simplicity in mind, you should do it. That doesn’t mean you have to dumb everything down to the point where you’re not achieving your goals. What it does mean, however, is that you design and develop with intent and purpose. If you find any component of your DevOps workflow is overly complex, then task your teams with simplifying that piece such that if it were to break, the fix would be obvious and quick.
Conclusion
DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering can go hand-in-hand. Even though these two ideas can be viewed as applying to very different aspects of your business, the truth is they are far closer in relation than you think.
Follow the 7 principles of SRE with your DevOps methodology, and you will find things go far more smoothly than you can imagine.
If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.
