Adopting DevOps Practises to Bring Certainty to These ‘Uncertain’ Times

October 31st 2020

@furyfury

DevOps and Agile practise have become one of the most logical solutions to IT teams working around the world, adjusting to the remote working environment, while trying to maintain productivity and workflow. As a system engineer, I have to admit that I underestimated the edge that DevOps culture brings to the table.

Read on for some of the best practises we use to be a strong, productive and cohesive team.

1. Remote Monitoring Tools for Cloud

Cloud adoption has been up significantly this year and database professionals are struggling to monitor both cloud-based and on-premise based servers. Needless to say, even non-production environments like UAT and staging have gone to hell because of the new remote practises.

The solution is simple, set up efficient remote monitoring tools. Once you start monitoring a remote server, it doesn’t matter where the server is.

Needless to say, this also implies the use of automation tools like Jenkins and Puppet, depending upon your project, like the example, Remote PC.

2. Bringing In Agents of Change

The gap between the development and operations team has become even wider, which necessitates the need for an Agent of Change. It’s usually someone who is adept as a developer and communicator, someone who can offer help in designing short term changes or evolving the entire architecture of the system — especially when there are less healthy lines of communication between the two teams.

3. Get Teams Together Periodically

This might seem tiring and unnecessary at first (I dreaded it initially), but building relationships is important, in the professional field or anywhere else. Knowing what your team member has in mind, can actually greatly reduce the time you need to spend on a working module. This is what the Scrum Master is trying to eliminate most often — ambiguity. Although one way of avoiding unnecessary sprint review/retrospectives is to attach an intentional, critical goal to it and convey expectations clearly.

4. Document EVERYTHING

As the pandemic has made it too clear, you never know when someone on the team will suddenly not be available for work. If people haven’t been documenting their work, you might spend hours just trying to figure out what’s going on. Whether individuals on your team handle their own documentation or you have a technical writer or both, make sure you are documenting the work as it progresses.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change” — Charles Darwin

It looks like we will be working remotely for a while now, and the best way to make sure we don’t spend too much time on work is to adapt to the right set of tools and DevOps practises.