Five Strategies to Help You Implement a Successful 24/7 DevOps Culture

A successful 24/7 DevOps culture nurtures a business’s competitiveness and positions it to better meet the increasing demands of its customers and the market.

If we think about companies like Netflix and Amazon that have reputations for being always-on and subsequently very reliable, it’s safe to say that we live in a digital economy where customers expect services to be available 24/7. For this reason, DevOps should be considered a culture that can and should be adopted for streamlined growth, even if you don’t have a development team.

Here are five strategies that can help you implement a successful DevOps culture:

1. Combine Development and Operations Around a Common Goal

One of the main objectives of DevOps is to unite development and operations around a shared goal. This requires regular communication (e.g., cross-functional meetings) and using collaborative tools like Slack and Jira that also facilitate combined problem-solving. The long-term efficacy of these endeavours depends on breaking down traditional organisational or institutional silos to better align processes, people, and tools.

For this to be successful, it requires top-down buy-in to ensure a systemic shift in organisational culture. When those in senior positions promote and model a collaborative mindset, and actively encourage feedback and open communication, it fosters cultural change capable of aligning the entire organisation towards a common goal.

Success can be determined by using unified metrics and KPIs that emphasise shared goals between development and operations. This alignment ensures that all team members are working towards common goals, fostering better collaboration and reducing friction between teams.

2. Promote Continuous Improvement

When development and operations work as a unified team, everyone shares responsibility. This should extend beyond the application to support the emphasis DevOps places on continuous improvement to optimise performance, cost, and speed of delivery. Continuous improvement also requires adapting to changing circumstances, constantly improving skill sets and learning new skills, and staying abreast of industry trends and advancements.

3. Take Advantage of Automation

Automation is a core component in DevOps and can be applied at multiple points in any business’s technology matrix.

Where DevOps is used more in its conventional capacity to unite development and operations, automation is key in continuous improvement and continuous delivery. Here it is used to integrate code changes, which includes testing and merging to reduce integration issues and improve code quality. Automation is also used in continuous delivery for the deployment of applications to reduce manual intervention, and for faster and more reliable releases.

But automation in the CI/CD pipeline is just one facet; automation can also be used to provision infrastructure where the big benefits are consistency and repeatability, and reducing configuration drift. In the same breath, automation is also notably used in the deployment and management of configuration settings for applications and infrastructure. Again, the benefit here is consistency and reducing the potential for human error.

Security and compliance can also benefit from automation. Continuous monitoring and automated vulnerability scanning are simply two of the tools that can be used proactively to identify security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. Automated compliance checks and audits keep systems compliant with industry standards.

4. Foster a Learning Culture

The ability to learn from mistakes is a key part of fostering a healthy 24/7 DevOps culture focused on growth. As an example, we can look to monitoring and incident management as an area where there are usually an abundance of opportunities to learn from.

There are plenty of tools available that DevOps teams can use to monitor performance and security, and pretty much anything else that has a valid metric. These include tools like Prometheus, Datadog, and ELK Stack. Monitoring can be used to proactively detect anomalies using these tools. The learning curve happens when we seek to resolve these anomalies before they become issues.

Monitoring can also be employed reactively to diagnose the root cause of an issue and get the right people to handle the incident. Where the objective is growth, the result of these efforts should not only be swift incident resolution but, where needed, the formulation of lightweight processes that can prevent the same issue from recurring and so improve the reliability of IT services, minimise the potential for downtime, and maintain a consistent user experience.

5. Leverage Managed DevOps Services

DevOps as a service seeks to help businesses achieve their desired outcomes and also ensure proper implementation of strategies such as continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) to deliver business value.

Leveraging managed DevOps services is a strategic approach for businesses aiming to implement a successful 24/7 DevOps culture. This approach provides numerous benefits, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that may lack the in-house expertise or resources to maintain a robust DevOps environment.

More importantly, DevOps as a service allows selective integration of various elements. An organisation could, for example, ask a managed DevOps provider to provide monitoring and incident response with the aim of identifying bottlenecks and areas for improvement.

Conclusion

Implementing a successful 24/7 DevOps culture is essential for modern businesses seeking to remain competitive and meet the demands of a fast-paced digital economy. By combining development and operations around common goals, promoting continuous improvement, leveraging automation, fostering a learning culture, and utilising managed DevOps services, businesses can create a resilient and efficient environment that supports growth and innovation. Adopting these strategies ensures that your organisation can deliver high-quality services reliably, enhancing customer satisfaction and maintaining a competitive edge in the market.