devops operations challenges

DevOps – Operations Challenges

Vijaya Kokkili

QA Manager | CommerceHub

vkokkili@gmail.com

@vkokkili

Sharing experience

How do other roles fit in DevOps?

• Microservices• Cloud services• Containers and Pods

But how are these effecting QA, DBA, IT?

Step 1 Step 2

Development Operations

How did DevOps evolve?

Frustration……

Lack of Communication

Lack of Collaboration

Increase in time and labor to deliver

Increase in time to maintain software systems

DevOps is not…..

A methodology X

A tool X

A process X

What is DevOps?

• It is a culture

• A mindset with the goal of stabilizing technology delivery via effective collaboration

• Breaking barriers between teams

Encourages…

• Collaboration• Communication• More accountable• Fast deliveries• Continuous improvement

Traditional Ops

• IT infrastructure used to be a service published to the rest of the organization

• All new requests were made to and executed by the operations team

With DevOps

The process is becoming more democratized and collaborative

How we started DevOps?

Project Management

Developers Quality Assurance

DBA Operation Support

PM1 Dev1 QA1 DBA1 Ops1

PM2 Dev2 QA2 DBA2 Ops2

PM3 Dev3 QA3 DBA3 Ops3

PM4 Dev4 QA4 DBA4 Ops4

Dev Manager QA Manager DBA Manager Ops ManagerPS Manager

Challenge #1

Ownership wars

Is DevOps crushing operations?

• Do you feel control of decision-making is shifting from DBA to developer?

• Do you feel like you’re always saying “no” to developers? Or, do you suspect that’s the impression that your coworkers have of you?

• Do you feel surprised by requests from the application development teams or feel disconnected from what they are doing?

Embrace shared tools and shared approaches Foster culture within its daily activities

Challenge #2

“App/Tool for that” generation

• Business users knowledge of tools

• Free trial of the tool

• Open source or SaaS based tools

Leverage shared services concept

Misaligned Tools

Development and Operations teams always had different set of tools

and process to deliver software

Tools/Process Type Dev/QA Ops

Issue Tracking Jira SalesForce

Version Control Repository

ClearCase Shared drive

Monitoring None DynaTrace

Build Maven N/A

Deployment process

Adhoc scripts Manual + Scripts

Testing Junit, QTP None

Challenge #3

Legacy meets cloud

• It is a cloud era

• We want to move fast

• Hybrid environments

• New components built in cloud

• Monolithic application to microservices

Get ready to become a matchmaker

Challenge #4

Testing of application

Functional testing – Wait until application is fully ready

Smoke testing…..

Test Plans

Contract Testing

Microservices Testing(http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservice-testing/)

Behavior Driven Development (BDD)(https://cucumber.io/)

Challenge #5

Time and Budget constraints

• Massive technology shifts

• Head count

• Training on new technologies

• Hiring new skills

• On-premise tool Vs SaaS application

Need for change on how IT budgets are structured

Challenge #6

Global Teams

• Time zone

• Communication

• Understanding priorities

Does this work in the DevOps culture?

Probable solutions

• Require all steps to deliver a s/w be automated in CD : There is no reason to spend time separately for releasepreparation

• Test every change: Not just code changes. But also data and configuration changes.

• Staged and automated delivery pipeline: No need for separate effort to release. Most recent version is always ready to release

• Deploy frequently : as code is ready (even partial chunk), release it!

• Test in production: Develop with ON/OFF and ability for limited user release (Canary release)

• Include DBA’s on SQL commits

Probable solutions (Contd…)

• Monitoring tools : For all environments

• Infrastructure automation: Puppet, Chef

• Tools to produce h/w: Virtualization tools

• CI, Build tools, Testing tools…….

Leave the past

Network administrators day-to-day work is no longer about manually configuring individual network devices by hand. As organizations embrace SDN, infrastructure orchestration and self service, less and less time needs to be spent doing “busy work”, and more time needs to be spent on architecture, planning and deep problem solving.

The future of devops and continuous delivery is a progressive move toward increasing selfservice offerings from vendors

Need for change

Operation teams need to change with the changing philosophies

Concept of NoDBA• Familiarize with NoSQL technologies

Share information and insights

Numbers talk…

Findings from the 2015 State of DevOps Report:

(Based on responses from over 20,000 tech professionals worldwide)

High-performing IT organizations experience 60X fewer failures and recover from failure 168X faster than their lower-performing peers. They also deploy 30X more frequently with 200X shorter lead times

Lean management and continuous delivery practices create the conditions for delivering value faster, sustainably

High performance is achievable no matter if your apps are greenfield, brownfield or legacy

DevOps initiatives launched solely by C-level executives or from the grassroots are less likely to succeed

Finally….

The key to navigating these challenges is to embrace these changes:• Culture• Process • Technologies

See challenges as opportunities

CommerceHub Careers

http://www.commercehub.com/about-us/careers/

Q & A’s

@vkokkili

vkokkili@gmail.com