Automation in Devops

You’ve probably encountered commands that believe that DevOps is the automation of everything. Especially young engineers with burning eyes love to automate everything. But the decision about automation is left to the leader who calculates the ROI of this automation. Any cost must pay off. If you spend 160 hours on automation and the task usually takes 5 minutes per month, it’s better to keep it “manual”.

Of course, sometimes it’s not just about ROI. The other case is that the task is big, complex and difficult to repeat. Here, automation is justified, it acts as a documentation. Or, for example, the automation of work with the cloud provider. If we understand that the project is large and we will often work manually with the cloud provider, it makes sense to automate. And if a customer urgently needs MVP to check demand, you need to be ready to work manually.

Propose to implement new technologies

You don’t have to do technology for the sake of technology, but always let the customer know if something can be greatly improved. To begin with, the client must be aware of the problem. An expert in the field should see the problem and report it to the customer, then propose a solution and argue your approach. It happens that the client is not ready to invest in the solution and asks to leave it as is. In that case, you can still implement the technology, but in your spare time. Some technologies make it very easy for you to work yourself, so it’s worth it.

Not DevOps specialists, but a delivery team

There is always a delivery team working on the product. This team is responsible for the final delivery of the product, not for any part of the work. We did not invent the word “Delivery-Manager” ourselves, it already existed on the market.

In EPAM practice, a delivery manager is always a technician and usually a former developer. Even if he does not write code now, he is able to make a code review. He knows how applications, platforms and their components are organized from the inside. He can coordinate architectural and technological solutions. It does not mean that a person works in all these roles at the same time, but he understands the basics and can organize a team.

As for the delivery team, it is a combination of people with the right skills. This can include a business analyst, QA tester, UX designer, developers with the right stack etc. Teams are individually selected each time depending on the project, the selection is done by the delivery-managers themselves. As a rule, a delivery-manager develops a specialization in some industry, be it finance, e-commerce or travel industry, and keeps track of its trends. This is why the delivery-manager is valuable to the customer – he understands the market and can offer solutions that were not included in the terms of reference, but are profitable for the business.

DevOps is always a culture, and it’s the culture that determines how effectively a company will build its development processes and how much more profitable those processes will be for itself, its customers and users. You must constantly add all the best practices to your knowledge base and also train your employees to do so.

How to learn

Social Learning is a system when you learn with someone, not alone. This, firstly, motivates you not to quit, and secondly, you get to know different points of view and approaches to the same problem. The easiest way to prepare is not to be alone, but together with your colleagues. You meet twice a week in the evenings and analyze cases. The good thing about the exam is that the program is already shelved, and you immediately understand how to use it in practice. If you want to get serious results at once, the easiest way is to hire devops service providers. This will allow you to get qualified support and reach a new level in this matter.