W H I T E PA P E R

NAVIGATE THE
DEVOPS JOURNEY
Achieving goals of continuous delivery
and improvement requires overcoming
cultural barriers and finding the right
balance of technology tools.

The growing reliance on deployment of cloud business solutions has accelerated the
movement toward a continuous integration and deployment model that amalgamates the
traditional silos of development and operations teams.

Many organizations are adopting the new application lifecycle management practices known
as DevOps to speed the completion of software and produce higher-quality outcomes. The
implementation of DevOps engages teams across the application lifecycle and allows for
continuous feedback between functions. But this requires a transformation that depends
on reducing cultural barriers, with the thoughtful integration of new and existing resources
supporting newly established processes.

Fostering cooperation across traditional silos doesnt happen overnight. Rather, DevOps is
a journey that requires previously segregated teams to overcome cultural barriers. Getting
everyone clearly focused on the business value and shared-solution responsibility transcends
individual roles and traditional barriers. Although the journey is unique to every organization,
there are tenets and practices that are generally consistent.

Extending agile to operations

Businesses increasingly recognize that competitive reality requires shortened cycle times
and maintaining and improving software quality. That, combined with the changing nature
of business solutions that encompass cloud and mobile, has demonstrated the inherent
limitations of traditional software development and lifecycle methodologies.

Virtualization and cloud computing have had a drastic impact on the application lifecycle
and the need to tightly align development and operations. With cloud resources readily
available and capable of being provisioned virtually instantaneously, development cycles are
no longer bound by hardware requisitioning, acquisition and installation schedules. Instead,
infrastructure is increasingly software-driven.

If you dont have proper automation and take application lifecycle management to the level
of infrastructure as code, there is no way to solve the process challenges of DevOps, says
Volker Will, director of technical evangelism with Microsoft, which has undertaken its own
transformative approach to software development.

Similarly, development and operations teams must be able to deliver apps on a greater variety
of devices and operating systems that are being upgraded and replaced at a relentless pace.
2 WHITE PAPER: NAVIGATE THE DEVOPS JOURNEY
As a result, traditional long-term iterative cycles of development
and deployment have fallen by the wayside, giving way to
continuous development and continuous integration of new
functions and services.
DevOps: beginning the journey
DevOps has moved beyond the fad stage and is rapidly going
mainstream as organizations grapple with the pressures of
technology and competitiveness. Successes in speeding up
application development with agile and similar methodologies and
processes have, in turn, spurred a bottom-up initiative to more
tightly align the development teams that build software and the
operations teams that run the software.
Saugatuck Technology, a research and management consulting
service, surveyed more than 300 development and IT operations
professionals and managers and found that 71 percent of the
responding companies have pockets of IT automation and 54
percent are incubating DevOps in one or more small projects. To
be successful, Saugatuck concludes in a report, DevOps must
grow beyond those pockets to span organizational groups and
their project activities.
Adapting to change
DevOps, in practice, streamlines the entire development workflow,
from build and test all the way into production, accompanied by
real-time monitoring of availability and performance as well as
analytics that provide insights into how the software is being used
and what the business needs to improve or enhance.
Each organization will experience its own challenges, but there
are common issues to be expected. Aligning the people, the
culture and the processes is the main challenge, but organizations
also have to determine how they will start to do DevOps, says
Microsofts Will. It is best implemented incrementally through
appropriately scoped projects from which to demonstrate
success, learn and evolve.
Although many agree that the biggest impediments to DevOps
adoption are often cultural, it does require integration of
technology and tools in use across the organization. The beauty
of DevOps is that, for the most part, it doesnt require new tools;
most products and tools already in use are suitable for DevOps
practicesthe difference is in the way you use them, says Will.
You have to ensure that the tools in use can be scripted or
automated to some extent.
Some of the impetus behind DevOps adoption is a result of the
availability of cloud computing resources such as Microsoft
Azure, which make it easier and more cost-effective to set
up and manage development, test and production processes
and outcomes with infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform
as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). But
building applications that utilize these resources can be an
application management challenge involving the deployment and
orchestration of groups of virtual machines and/or combinations
of cloud resources and services.
At Microsoft we believe we have a set of products that supports
the underlying desire of DevOps to be more efficient and to
become more effective in the software delivery process, says
Will. More and more enterprises are adopting DevOps practices,
using our tools and integrating third-party and open source tools
with our development infrastructure and the Microsoft Azure
cloud platform.
Because of its bottom-up emergence, DevOps has benefited
tremendously from the open source movement and open
communities that eagerly share knowledge and insights. Microsoft
has forged integration partnerships with some of the leading
open sourceinspired technology providers, including Puppet
Labs, Chef and Docker, aimed at fostering the DevOps application
lifecycle management with Microsoft Visual Studio Online and
Microsoft Azure.
With Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online, you can easily
set up continuous deployments, says Will. Azure Automation
lends itself very well to DevOps practices, automating in very
repeatable and predictable ways an organizations off-premises
infrastructure. Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration
(DSC) also provides for the repeatable automation of configuration
across cloud and on-premises environments.
Microsoft also recently announced Nano Server, a deeply
refactored version of Windows Server with a small footprint and
remotely managed installation optimized for the cloud and a
DevOps workflow. Nano Server will be API-compatible with other
versions of Windows Server within the subset of components
it includes and fully supports Visual Studio. Other recent
developments from Microsoft are microservices, highly scalable
and resilient units of deployment for modern applications, and
Windows Server containers that run in Microsoft Azure.
Tightly integrated development and
deployment
With the ability to tightly integrate third-party and open source
tools and services, the Visual Studio Online development platform
and the Azure deployment platform help speed enterprises
on their DevOps journey, with rich data providing insight into
performance issues and user behavior to drive future priorities
and investments.
Partnering with Microsoft to integrate the right tools and
technologies at each stage can help development and operations
teams respond together to competitive industry pressures and
the rapid pace of enterprise application development. For more
information, please go to microsoft.com/devops. n