From the minds of DevOps experts to the Live Crowd Chat produced by Capital Carbon Consulting, the following expository has been constructed with the expertise and poise of DevOps Professionals, with the support headed by the Canada DevOps Community of Practice Events. This paper will not only walk you through the current times in our business structure and restructuring, it will give insights as to how to take those many steps further into successful future goal triumphs. Written by Christine Dyack.
As the world around us is changing, twisting and pulling itself out of its old dried out layers from the past, self reflection and value restructuring have become part of the new normal. The Covid-19 pandemic has given us some time to take a deep breath and have a look around. What have we seen? We have seen that there is much to be done in order for the business and personal world to move forward into successful unknown times. If there could be a magical solution that would help feed change into any business culture and restructure it from the inside out, would everyone grasp on to this idea and embrace it into their solutions team? We think yes, as DevOps experts, we have had the solution all along just not the right environment to prove DevOps can rapidly improve business situations. Why can DevOps do this? With Innovation as the key figure in all methodologies and practices.
The world is going through a sociological evolution, indirectly setting us on a course of human-centric innovation
The world, as we look at it today, has changed many faces in the last six months. As we planned, observed, placed actions and then retrospect, we have learned a great deal about what we used to have and what we have now. The world is going through a sociological evolution, a breakthrough if we may call it, into a future of re-evaluated life needs and wants. As Anurag Sharma ( @anuragthoughts) explained it well, “... more on human-centric innovations Our business cultures are taking a new step into unknown territory with a more humanistic balance of work to life ratios and instead of gradually dipping its toes in the water to check the temperature, our pandemic environment has pulled us into the pool, and we found the water of “human-centric innovations” to be tropical and warm. Mark Peters ( @tinycyber) said it best, “... Like disruption to spark directed innovation, working better and smarter.” The environment we have been thrown into has indirectly set us on a course of planned and continuous innovative actions and strategic mindsets. We are not to say that the year 2020 was at all an easy time, many people are suffering, however, we are demonstrating that in a time of crisis, we as the people, will always find strength to adapt to our challenges and adopt new ways to survive successfully. With all of this new found, uncharted lands ahead of us in our business structures, where will we turn next in order to gather as much information about our Environment as we can? First, we must look at the challenges we are facing today in our businesses and organizations.
Could innovation reverse the three ways of DevOps by starting with an experiment, validating with feedback and working backwards to flow?
Vishnu Vasudevan ( @vishnube) described our new business cultures perfectly, “with (the) pandemic, effective decision making has become (a) challenge due to people working in remote (status), it leads to multiple meetings and it takes time to make a call.” One of the biggest challenges being faced is aligning schedules from around the world. Time Accommodation has, in the past, predominately favoured those considered to be of higher leadership, which usually meant late night/early morning meetings before the sun began to shine. However, as we uncomfortably pulled ourselves out of the conventional and into the new unconventional realms, we noticed that it wasn’t so uncomfortable after all. Although, we still do have these same sacrifices, we have become more mindful towards time zones and reducing these sacrifices by accommodating to unconventional times for all. Mark Peters ( @tinycyber) pointed out how we went about solving this challenge in a quick and effective manner when he stated, “Integration, execution, and feedback. Delivering telemetry everywhere to make better choices about development and environments.” Business culture saw a problem, looked at the current available tools and ran with them, successfully building a roadmap to an undetermined successful end goal.
Now that we have begun to document the challenges we are facing in our new environment; our directives have also started to evolve into a different kind of entity. The air in this environment seems to be much crisper and uplifting than we have remembered it and we gaze at our surroundings as if we look upon them with familiarities, yet there is something that is just not the same. Our instincts take in this information and translate it into an emergency state, but is it truly an emergency? Mark Peters ( @tinycyber) described this feeling perfectly with a solution when he stated, “Could innovation reverse the 3 ways by starting with an experiment and working backwards to flow?” As if to say, yes, we are familiar with our environment and yes, we have been here before, but maybe we need to use a different pair of glasses to see where our solutions lie. Occam’s Razor (Ockham’s Razor) strikes again! Sometimes the best solution is right in front of us by looking at what we have but in a different manner. Reverting the three horizons can be used to directly impact immediate environmental changes that could not be predicted before.
Also read: A complete guide to CI/CD pipelines
As Siddharth Pareek ( @pareeksiddharth) put it, “Continuous Innovation and Continuous Improvements...(are the key).” We must see the tools we have right in front of us, assess their capabilities to the fullest extent, collaborate with other tools to make it work, then when we successfully triumph over an emergency state. We then review our re-assembled tools and improve them to help them better predict the current and future situations, sounds familiar AI and Automation advocates? Continuous Improvements are the first concepts needed to adopt in an environment that slightly changes each day.
There is a clause towards this approach, however, that we need to take into consideration. Mahfuzur Rahman, ( @_yeg) described it wonderfully, “We must run many teams in parallel in order for successful deployment to occur, and not only are we trusting each team to have the entire vision in mind, we are redefining success as a whole.” Innovation, in its entirety, requires us to think in a manner which we are open to new possibilities with old concepts, refreshing the business models into a new light of success, creating an ideology of Continuous Practices.
Now, with this all being said, how can we adopt such ideas? In an environment that is constantly changing and our needs, as businesses and organizations, increase, what can we do to support our teams facing these challenges? “Gamification! Innovate, build solutions, have fun and build a new business culture.” Exclaimed Vishnu ( Vasudevan @vishnube). “Governance and co creation using Open-Source Projects!” proclaimed Garima ( Bajpai @bajpaigarima1). The key software trends which will help accelerate the pace of innovation will definitely be, “Open Source, Data Intensive Application, Artificial Intelligence.” Garima Bajpai “Rapid ( @bajpaigarima1); Prototyping, AI, Robotic processes, New internet AR/VR.” Anurag Sharma ( @anuragthoughts); “Telemetry everywhere, zero-trust, remove vendor lock in through integrated platforms... automated scanning, automated patching, and real-time continuous monitoring at every step of the process.” Mark Peters ( @tinycyber). So many solutions available at our fingertips, which by the way, are directly involved in DevOps practices. The future is available today!
As we look back and revisit to a time where we were all comfy and set in our routine ways, we now wonder how we managed to grow following that same “checkout line” of business life. At the time of the pandemic lockdown, we felt that life would never be the same again, we fought change and worried about what would be around the corner (that landed, out of nowhere, directly in front of us). And as the mother bird teaches her younglings how to fly, we were pushed out of our warm nest and into the sky of unknowns. What we did not expect from this new environment, was that we would love to fly! We would like to thank the following participants with great appreciation for their expertise and contributions to discuss this hot topic in the DevOps Community. Your presence is greatly valued with highest regards and esteem.
Canada DevOps Community of Practice Events original post: http://bit.ly/DevOpsSummit20202
Contributors: @vishnube @bajpaigarima1 @wszepesi @mparthshah @gunjansyal @pareeksiddharth @christined3396 @pgmaddison @SteveZhengCA
