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1. GOVERNANCE, ARCHITECTURE, ORG STRUCTURE, AND CULTURE

Culture

DevOps is a journey; you can’t just turn up and implement DevOps, and what is DevOps anyway? The Term itself may have very different meaning for organisations of varying size and capability.

DevOps often starts when either Developers or Ops Engineers begin exploring the possibilities of deploying applications and infrastructure together using tools that are driven by code. How that then translates into a fully fledged DevOps process then depends on the management at the top.

Cultural Change is an essential part of DevOps. Management needs to have a clear message showing how engaging in a DevOps style workflow is going to help the company as a whole.

People are creatures of habit, and DevOps challenges the practices of the last 30 years of IT. Hence without a clear cultural direction that the ways of old are no longer acceptable, they will merely continue. It is almost “too easy” to fall back into old methods when the new ones have to be learned and seem a little too hard.

Hence Cultural change takes a forward thinking and strong cultural direction from the top. Planning methods and org structures need to change towards Agile and collaborative working.

Org Structure

Driving cultural change will not work without org change. Traditional org structures that see Dev and Ops teams split and siloed will not provide the collaborative environment DevOps and Agile needs. DevOps aims to do away with “throwing it over the fence”, and instead any problem is “Our problem”.

There are several approaches for how to achieve this org change, each has their advantages, and there is no one size fits all model; hence a blend of approaches usually ends up being the result. If the Org is a traditional one, Org change will be required; so be ready to change the Org.

Governance

Management also needs to implement an effective governance structure to ensure that those who are now collaborating are doing so consistently and coherently. Cloud is often associated with DevOps and combined the two are a formidable combination. It is possible to do some fantastic things with Cloud – such as deploy an application to 30 different countries, just by changing a line of code. However, such a change can have serious issues, as the person making the changes has not considered aspects outside of the actual implementation. GDPR has been a massive topic of late, so its well understood that the location of data is critical, but does the DevOps engineer go through a GDPR Compliance thought process when deploying an application, or does he decide which country it goes in and that’s it.

Governance is required to take the enormous set of options and possibilities down to a level that is manageable understood and agreed on by the organisation.

Some form of enforcement with checks and balances is also advised to ensure that the governance is appropriate and is working.,

Architecture

DevOps and Agile promote collaborative working, however with so many options and so many ways to achieve an outcome for a given business problem people may go in completely different directions. That may not seem wrong in the short term, but long-term it creates problems that will be hard to undo in the future.

Hence through Governance comes architecture.

A unified architecture lays down the blueprint for what good looks like, what its inputs are, what it is expected to do, and how it can be tested and measured.

Architecture is not materially concerned with implementation, which is where DevOps comes in, however with the ability to do so much with only a few lines of code; Architecture is required to ensure that the picture makes sense once the implementation has taken place.

2. ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT, COST MANAGEMENT AND RECHARGE

Without good accounting and cost management DevOps will lead to sprawl.
More to follow….

3. IDENTITY AND ACCESS MANAGEMENT

Both Identify for manging the DevOps and Identity for applications needs to be managed

more to follow…

4. OBFUSCATION, ENCRYPTION AND KEY MANAGEMENT

Encryption should be the default.

More to follow

5. INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES (AD, DNS, BACKUP, TIME, AV, FIREWALL, IDS/IPS ETC)

Even Cloud apps need infrastructure

more to follow.

6. APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE, RESILLIANCE AND BCP, APPLICATION CODE, DATABASE,

Unit/Integration/Performance/UAT Testing
The application itself.

More to follow.

7. ADMINISTRATION, AUTOMATION IAC AND CI/CD.

This is where most people think DevOps resides…Try doing this without 1-6 in place…

more to follow…

8. LIFECYCLE AND CONTINUED COMPLIANCE

How applications are recycled needs to be managed.

More to Follow…

9. LOG MANAGEMENT, MONITORING AND ALERTING

When systems are transient, there needs to be a method for managing log data.

more to follow…

10. SELF SERVICE, CHANGE, RELEASE AND EVENT MANAGEMENT

DevOps is supposed to make things quicker and easier, but you still need controls.

more to follow.