Enterprises around the world are rapidly embracing DevOps, and for good reason. Undergoing a DevOps transformation requires organizations to address waste and inefficiencies while enabling them to increase deployment frequencies, maintain high standards of quality, and centralize compliance.

Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise by Gary Gruver, a former senior DevOps executive with companies like Hewlett-Packard and macy’s.com, explores every step of the DevOps journey—from optimizing basic deployment pipelines through scaling within and beyond different team structures and more. In the last chapter of his book, he looks specifically at some of the real effects that a DevOps transformation can have on large enterprises. We have highlighted them here for you. If you would like to learn more, you can also download the complete e-book for free courtesy of CloudBees. Click here to access it.

1.   Projects Become Easier to Manage—Even Large Ones

Big projects have always been notoriously difficult to manage. With traditional development models, enterprises find themselves setting up a variety of checkpoints and scheduling long meetings to coordinate ongoing work.

Establishing a robust deployment pipeline changes the game:

• The working code aligns the work and becomes, in Gruver’s words, the “forcing function that gives those teams a common objective of keeping the code working in a production-like environment”. As individual teams or developers are working on their code, they can check on a routine basis to ensure it works seamlessly with what else is being developed. If they encounter roadblocks, a well-structured deployment pipeline enables them to resolve issues efficiently.
• Large meetings (“Scrum of Scrum meetings” as Gruver calls them) become things of the past since everyone involved is able to see progress in real time.

Click here to download your own copy of Starting and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise.

2.   Configuration Management, Auditing, and Compliance Are Simplified

Configuration management is a key pillar of any successful DevOps transformation. With a traditional approach, changes need to be manually documented, approved, and implemented. Relying on a rigorous deployment pipeline enables enterprises to automate each step:

• Identification: Using discovery or common repository tools, organizations can automatically determine the correct configuration (or configurations).
• Control: Once items have been identified, automated change management processes control any changes according to pre-set frameworks.
• Audits: Although control mechanisms are in place, regular audits are necessary to ensure nothing has been able to bypass them and guarantee compliance.

Relying on a rigorous deployment pipeline enables your enterprise to effectively automate the implementation and tracking of changes, while codified approval processes support more repeatable release criteria.

Keep in mind that your automation may not be perfect at the outset. What matters is that, once you make the fixes you need, you can depend on processes being executed properly virtually 100% of the time. As Gruver says, “This approach really takes advantage of what computers do very well, which is repeat the same thing, the same way, every single time.”

3.   Quality, Performance, and Speed Improve

In the forward he wrote for Gruver’s book, Jez Humble, a fellow DevOps evangelist and author of Continuous Delivery, makes an observation:

Using continuous delivery, we can build products whose success derives from a collaborative, experimental approach to product development. Everybody in the team contributes to discovering how to produce the best user and organizational outcomes. End users benefit enormously when we can work with them from early on in the delivery process and iterate rapidly, changing the design of systems in response to their feedback, and delivering the most important features from early on in the product lifecycle.

For all the process-related benefits it brings, DevOps’ greatest potential is perhaps its ability to make organizations quicker and more agile. Teams can deploy releases and updates more efficiently and deal with issues more rapidly, which means better results and higher, more consistent revenues.

Read our previous blog to learn more about the ROI of enterprise DevOps.

Making the Most of Enterprise DevOps

A managed DevOps toolchain is the smarter solution for automating software development and delivery:

• Unified, Collaborative CI/CD Tool Chain: We integrate configure, and manage your favourite tools-as-a-service into one flexible toolchain to simplify and streamline development processes.
• DevOps Consulting Service: Our DevOps experts are here to understand your DevOps and business objectives so we can help make recommendations and implement changes to get you to the end goal quicker. We can also accelerate your team’s onboarding by providing DevOps tool chain and processes best practices.
• Overcome Resource Complexity and Challenges: Spend more time on your core business and rely on experts for your DevOps initiatives. We offer a turnkey toolchain-as-a-service as well as DevOps-as-a-service to be an extension of your DevOps team.

iTMethods enables companies with a fully-managed toolchain on our DevOps SaaS platform and supports a broad variety of leading development tools including CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise, GitHub, JFrog, Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Hipchat, Trello, and many more.

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About iTMethods:

iTMethods helps companies accelerate software delivery capabilities through their Cloud-native DevOps SaaS Platform. The Enterprise SaaS offering features a toolchain catalog comprised of best-of-breed DevOps tools including CloudBees Jenkins, Github, Atlassian, Sonatype, and many more. These tools are deployed to each customer’s specific requirements, including security, scalability, and 24/7 customer support. Learn more at itmethods.com.

Read more from iTMethods:

• 6 Tips for Scaling Your DevOps Transformation
• Why You Need to Care about DevOps
• Aligning Developers with a DevOps Cloud Strategy