Tolga Talks Tech is a weekly summer video series in which Onica’s CTO Tolga Tarhan tackles technical topics related to AWS and cloud computing. This week Tolga talks about DevOps Transformation with Onica’s Practice Lead for Delivery & Engagement, Myles Anderson. For more videos in this series, click here.
What is DevOps Transformation?
When we think about “DevOps” we often think of technology, particularly continuous integration and delivery, and the tooling that enables that sort of workflow. DevOps Transformation suggests that this tooling isn’t going to support successful DevOps alone. Instead, people and processes in conjunction with tooling are what’s needed to truly adopt DevOps.
This idea has been around for a while. Many organizations that have attempted to move forward with DevOps have struggled just using the tools when confronted with existing legacy processes. By enacting transformation, you’re acknowledging that processes and mindset alos need to change.
What are the challenges customers run into as they try to adopt to large changes?
Transformation implies a big undertaking in and of itself. When looking at an organization that’s been around a while, there are a lot of existing silos and processes within the organization. DevOps forces reevaluation of the entire way of traditional development thinking, particularly since the traditional IT methods have likely informed the organization’s process. So it’s more than just bringing in a new development process or having a DevOps engineer. Instead, it’s instituting a large organizational change.
How do we see customers overcoming these challenges?
The first step is to admit there’s a problem and acknowledge there’s a big transformation involved. Second is you have to adopt some form of agile and not attempt to fit it into a legacy process.
Next, we see a lot of success in embedding our teams or embedding teams that know DevOps and have done it to overcome initial skepticism. A lot of organizations look at this big change and think it’s just not going to work. Bringing in teams who have done it and embedding them alongside our customers engineers and technology staff really helps them learn and adopt it, and helps battle that skepticism.
The last piece is to do it incrementally. We’re not going to spend six months upfront and map out a new work chart, new people, and a new process. Instead we start small. We’re going to tackle a single workload, we’re going to do a migration in a CI/CD DevOps fashion. We’re going to bring people in from security, testing, and production support to get involved and become advocates in their organizations. Then when they understand it, they’re going to teach their organizations and teach their teams how to do it. We’ve seen some great results from customers with this method, and we look forward to continuing with it.
Want to improve your organizations productivity though automation and a DevOps culture? Learn how Onica and AWS can accelerate your DevOps Transformation journey.
Read our CI/CD on AWS Whitepaper to learn how to leverage AWS tooling for automated testing & deployment in the cloud
