10 things you can do to implement DevOps right now

If you’re coming from a traditional IT background, DevOps may sound big, bold, audacious, or hard to grasp. It may seem to challenge everything you’ve been doing in your IT profession for 20 years. Even if it’s the way forward and improves IT/Organization performance, you may wonder where to start? How do you achieve any tangible progress quickly? How do you navigate your way through the numerous practices and tools? Where is the ideal entry point, and what can your team implement right away?

Here are 10 quick and free things you can do that provides immediate value and start implementing DevOps

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1. Version Control Your Working Assets Bitbucket is free, and private. Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) projects spaces can also be setup quickly (with help from the TFS admin). Version control your scripts, leverage Bitbucket’s large file systems for large high volume artifacts and turn operation tasks into product features.

2. Set Up Notifications and Collaboration With Slack, Salesforce Chatter or Microsoft Teams, you can automate the notifications of certain automated tasks so that all you team members know what’s being done in real-time with the tools you’re using. Notification tools like Slack integrates with build servers, source control and monitoring tools.

3. Use Telemetry Put up information radiators (dashboards) so that everyone has access to the status of projects and task. Information flow reduces the need for status meetings, and empowers all team members with certain logs, builds, deployment information they needs in real-time

4. Leverage Build Servers Use builds servers like Jenkins or Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to refresh or backup databases, provision servers, configure network routers etc. You can automate, schedule or trigger these types of tasks and much more. By using build servers, you can save hours a week on repeatable rudimentary tasks.

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5. Manage Your Artifacts Use Artifactory for artifact management. Artifactory allows you to maintain several versions of you build artifact(s) (compiled code). This reduces the need to continuously rebuild to get to multiple versions of your code. You can also quickly run tests and deployments on multiple versions of your code.

6. Use Containers Use Docker for Dev and Test environments. They are very easy to spin up and their documentation and tutorial facilitate quick learning.

7. Configuraton ManagementUse Ansible, Chef or Puppet for configuration management, leverage templates for the components of your system, such as databases, web servers, etc.

8. Document For Self and Project Preservation Tutorials, FAQs, wikis and knowledge base help with continual learning. The next team member that will be in charge of the project you currently manage won’t have to deal with a steep learning curve if you leave a trail of breadcrumbs by way of documenting your work process, bugs, tools, etc.

9. Share Your Wins Encourage your team to showcase accomplishments, hold regular knowledge transfer meetings, workshops, tutorials, ignite talks, demos, trainings, etc. This will send the right message about your DevOps implementation. Other teams can be inspired, and can also learn from your showcase.

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10. Improve – Solving a Problem or Optimize a Process Refine whatever you’re doing right now even if only by a little bit. DevOps is a chain of practices and tools as well as a looped process. This fosters continual learning and improvement.

Bonus

Become cross-functional Perform some doable tasks you usually leave for the other team. For example, as a Dev automate some OPs or QA scripts, or as a QA or OPs, version control your scripts just like the Devs.

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