How Managed DevOps Can Improve Software Tools and Deployment

Your organization is past the DevOps adoption phase. Or is it? Many companies want the ideal DevOps arrangement: development and operations teams working merrily together, application silos coinciding without missing a beat, and automated everything until the end of time. However, making this happen is still overwhelming to many, which is why the evolution of DevOps continues.

Enter managed DevOps.

"One of the first phases of DevOps was the people--teams actually working together instead of being siloed," said Glenn Grant, President of US East at Mission, a managed AWS provider. "The next phase was the DevOps adoption, both in people culture and the tooling. Now, the third phase is improving upon the software, and the tools, and the deployment."

Managed DevOps services elevate the goals of DevOps and encourage companies to focus on what they're good at--either customer-facing products or, in the case of Mission's client, basketball.

Mission is responsible for bringing the Celtics into the cloud. "The Boston Celtics is an institution that has been around for quite a long time and, in a technology sense, so has their technology," Grant said." We really helped them transition from the legacy waterfall style of software development to more of an agile process, in conjunction with leveraging infrastructure as code and DevOps methodologies for deployment and testing."

Like the Celtics, there are some organizations that are working toward managed DevOps and want to update how they do things, particularly in making a push to cloud computing. On the other hand, innovative solutions companies are also building out their own infrastructures.

"The software developers have built the infrastructure because the cloud makes it fairly easy to do that," Grant said. "But their expertise is in software development and not in infrastructure architecture, and that is when they'd reach out to us."

How can developers successfully focus on their user-facing product when they're trying to figure out the infrastructure of the organization? In many instances, these new solutions companies don't have the capacity to manage it all themselves.

"Being excellent at infrastructure, nine times out of 10, isn't what makes their company valuable," said Grant. "Being excellent at building the software that they make and sell is what makes their company valuable."

A company like Mission offers a variety of ways to help an organization manage DevOps and infrastructure.

"Usually, when customers come to us, they don't really have a lot going on in the DevOps realm. We do our initial consulting, and we create a technology roadmap … Our goal is to identify where we're trying to go with your cloud infrastructure and your DevOps practice and identify what I like to call 'the front domino,'" Grant said. "What is the first project or thing we need to tackle in order to line up the things behind it?"

Mission leaves the decision making up to the customer, in terms of how much support is needed. They can step in at any level to manage DevOps and infrastructure issues. One of the first questions Missions asks, according to Grant, is, "What currently is taking up your time, and what can we build that, once it is built, won't take up your time anymore?"

Whether a company needs an entire DevOps team, wants to speed up the time it takes to reach a milestone in DevOps adoption or needs extra capacity, a DevOps management service can happen at any capacity.

Managed DevOps can change how well an organization is run, lifting the heavy weight that can sometimes drag developers down.

"If they're doing a manual software deployment today and we put the effort into making it an automated software deployment, they essentially don't have to do deployments anymore. It is automated from there on out, and they get a whole bunch of time back," Grant said. Organizations at any stage of DevOps can consider managed DevOps to overcome business and infrastructure hurdles.