With a properly crafted app lifecycle regime, the enterprise can enhance user satisfaction while continuously rolling out new experiences, all while making efficient use of technical and human assets.
No matter which DevOps approach suits your goals, it must be remembered that while your provider answers to you when it comes to meeting performance expectations, you answer to your users.
IT operations management remains a distinct entity in a DevOps world, and in fact will see substantial changes as the focus moves beyond the simple oversight of physical or even virtual resources.
DevOps teams will need to incorporate two practices that aim to gauge performance across distributed architectures: synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM). The difference lies in the approach used to gather data.
One of the biggest mistakes is thinking that traditional performance metrics can give you an idea of what is working, and what is not, in a DevOps environment.
Monitoring is proving to be a significant challenge in the emerging DevOps era, not only because development and IT operations use different tools to peer into their respective environments, but in many cases have completely different ideas of what success means.
The success of any DevOps project rests on the ability of enterprise management to attract the right people and put them in the right environment that allows creativity to flourish, but not at the expense of efficiency or positive outcomes.
Enterprises transitioning toward a DevOps model of application development and support are quickly finding that the most crucial asset at their disposal is not tools or technology, but people.
Those who embrace DevOps now will be in a far better position to capitalize on emerging application- and service-based business models in the coming decade.
The CIO must not only manage the changes to infrastructure and processes that guide this new form of knowledge work, DevOps, but must also reevaluate the basic functions that a CIO must perform.
For upper-level management, a successful conversion to DevOps will require equal parts leadership and support. The vision of how it is to evolve and its overall contribution to the business process will have to come from the top.