DevOps: Our Definition
The Releaseworks approach to DevOps; a seven-stage primer
Culture: DevOps represents a significant change in company culture, breaking down silos between development and operations teams.
Automation & Scripting: Automation is a key component of DevOps, improving efficiency and consistency while reducing the chance of human error.
Build & Deploy: CI/CD is a practice where code changes are automatically integrated, built, tested, and prepared for production release. It aims to make deployments predictable, routine affairs that can be performed at any time.
Test & Verification: Automated testing often accompanies this to catch bugs or issues early. This should be baked straight into the build pipeline.
Design & Architecture: Infrastructure-as-Code provisions architectural components through machine-readable scripts, rather than manual processes, in order to scale infrastructure.
Security Integration: DevOps also necessitates integrating security practices into the software delivery pipeline, often referred to as DevSecOps or simply ‘Security-by-Design’.
Monitoring & Reporting: Forming a feedback loop is essential for the iterative enhancement of products, processes, and ultimately, customer satisfaction. We measure a number of product and business metrics to form a true picture.
DevOps Performance Metrics to gauge impact
To ensure continuous improvement, it's important to collect data and measure the effectiveness of DevOps practices. Examples include, but are not limited to;
Change Request Lead Time (‘Velocity’) - The length of time between a feature request or change request coming via Business Case through the Product team, to becoming a real part of the usable product.
Change Failure Rate - The rate at which code changes require rollbacks.
Deployment Pipeline Release Frequency - The number of deployments live per week (hint; smaller and more frequent = better!).
Automated Deployment Level - The number of stages in a deployment chain where dev/engineering are actively involved.
Automated Security & Test Level - The number of test, security checks and validation checks performed by a human.
Environment Maintenance Time - The amount of time required to maintained development, build, test, staging and production environments (ideally zero).
Time-to-Recovery in Disaster Recovery - The average length of downtime due to critical failures and its resultant business impact, mitigated through smart monitoring systems and scripted self-healing infrastructure.
Releaseworks® delivers meaningful change through DevOps
The above examples are merely a starting point and serve only to scratch the surface of what DevOps can bring to your company when implemented correctly, routinely monitored and thoroughly assessed.
Going beyond the technologies, processes and workflows, we approach every customer engagement with a business-focused mindset to drive the outcomes you desire in line with your corporate goals and objectives.
Supercharge your DevOps capabilities with Releaseworks®
We design, build and support
Releaseworks® is the trusted partner for Cloud and DevOps.
Our service offering includes DevOps and Cloud strategy, Cloud Engineering, and 24/7 Global DevOps support.
We understand your needs
At Releaseworks®, we specialise in Cloud and DevOps only.
We work with start-ups and enterprise organisations, and are well-versed in the unique challenges of both environments.
Experts available on demand
Our team consists of permanent full-time employees based in the United Kingdom.
All Releaseworks® engineers hold one or more industry certifications, and are background checked according to the UK Government Baseline Personnel Security Standard (BPSS).