Time to market is more important than ever before because the competition is on the rise. Successful retailers are deploying every 12 seconds a new release. In this blog post, I will outline reasons for short release sprints and shine a light on the fundamental role of monitoring in a DevOps environment.
Benefits of the DevOps approach
Tight release sprints are a challenge for your development pipeline. Design-implement-test-deploy slots are short and require an excellent collaboration between your teams. Daily stand-up meetings will help to improve and distribute the knowledge about the new product quickly.
Ongoing learning and product optimization is another key aspect for teams working in DevOps mode. Especially if you develop innovative products, the requirements are often not in place, and therefore the design is very tricky. Tight feedback loops are essential. Your teams will continuously create and develop new features, and your clients will review those. Due to this involvement, the acceptance for new products is high.
Also testing and deployment at production is no longer a pain in DevOps projects. All repetitive tasks such as functional regression tests, performance tests, and necessary security checks are highly automated. QA specialists focus mainly on the new features. Automated tests verify the core functionality and quickly provide an overview of the actual quality of the new product.
Automated deployment solutions enable teams to promptly roll-out new features or switch back to the previous version if something does not work as expected. Thanks to this high automation of test and deployment activities, the failure rate is low. All parties involved are willing to share their product knowledge. Once the new release successfully deployed, your operation teams provide the necessary insight and feedback. They continuously collect key performance metrics and share those across the organization.
Monitoring in DevOps environments
DevOps is no guarantee for error free software. The pace of new features and changed components is high. Typically, complexity is increasing, and often hundreds of micro-services are used. Whenever a failure occurs, there is not much time to identify the root-cause and work on an appropriate resolution.
Successful DevOps teams found a solution for this dilemma. They understood that a profound monitoring is a key to adequate mean time to repair cycles. And appropriate monitoring approach includes all layers, all transactions, and all environments. Often they use a monitoring platform which captures the end user experience, allows a drill-down through technical components and a vertical analysis of error hot spots.
Your Takeaways
Automation is essential in DevOps
Monitoring of all transactions provides the required insights
Horizontal and vertical drill down allows a quick hotspot analysis
Share monitoring data across organization
Don’t put the advantages of DevOps projects at risk. I recommend improving your monitoring strategy to hold the pace with your competitors and realize more benefits of the powerful DevOps procedure.
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