How Microsoft does DevOps

Developer Support

In this blog post, Application Development Manager, Justin Wendlandt, shares a bit about DevOps strategy, why it’s important, and common areas Premier Developer can help your teams.


 

One of the core focuses at every enterprise or technology organization is how to deliver more business value to their sponsors. It may be phrased differently depending on who you ask. Some statements I hear are, “we need to do more with less”, “release features more often” or my favorite, “build software faster”.

In today’s cloud-first, mobile-first world technology companies are stuck between features that their business sponsors or customers want and staying current on the new technologies that are changing to support those features. In order to accommodate those moving targets on both sides, your team needs to move faster and be more agile to the changes. So what changes does your organization need to make in terms of People, Processes and Technology in order to build software faster?

At Microsoft, we are heavily focused on the topic of DevOps. It’s that grey area between what a developer does day-to-day and what happens inside an operations organization on a daily basis. Our internal product groups at Microsoft are sharing our story in terms of this transformation to adopt a strong relationship between developers and operations, find out more here – http://stories.visualstudio.com/devops/.

The reason why DevOps is a focus for most companies today is because of the complexity in orchestrating tasks between developers, infrastructure engineers and operations teams. That pain used to be absorbed by organizations “throwing it over the wall” and making it someone else’s problem. In a healthy DevOps organization, it becomes everyone’s problem.

DevOps Pain

@DonovanBrown’s view of why DevOps is popular right now: http://bit.ly/DevOpsHurts

DevOps should be viewed in terms of closing the feedback loop between product owners and technology rather than doing more with less, or building software faster. Shortening the time it takes to go from a user story, to a release to production. By doing this effectively, your team can inherently gain in terms of quality of delivery, speed to market and hopefully return on investment. Below we can see how complex this all is by the complexity by People, Process and Technology.

Another good perspective on DevOps comes from @jezhumble from Chef during this last year’s ChefConf. Jez Humble touches on changes needed to implement enterprise developer and operations relationships. The keynote touched on several aspects of DevOps such as “The Alignment Trap”, “Water-Scrum-Fall” and “Emergency Change Process vs. Normal Change Process”.

You are not alone in this journey of adopting a healthy DevOps practice. There are many ways that Premier Developer can help by providing services or advice on each topic listed in the diagram above.


Premier Support for Developers provides strategic technology guidance, critical support coverage, and a range of essential services to help teams optimize development lifecycles and improve software quality.  Contact your Application Development Manager (ADM) or email us to learn more about what we can do for you.

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