Tag: DevOps

10 Key Metrics of DevOps: To Measure App Success Rate Amit Jain December 15, 2022

What is DevOps?

  • DevOps is simply the unification of the development and operations line-up. DevOps incorporates developer and operation teams to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, workflows and continuously measuring application performance.
  • DevOps teams try to automate everything. It could be testing a new code or setting up new infrastructure.
  • The infrastructure for development includes Planning, Coding, Testing, and Building. In contrast, the infrastructure for operations includes Release, Operate, Deploy, and Monitor.
  • In a traditional setup, developers write large chunks of code for their software over weeks or even months. A DevOps mindset allows them to write small pieces of code that are integrated, tested, monitored, and deployed in hours. It will not only increase the frequency of application deployments but also reduce the time required to deploy new code.
  • It improves their ability to respond to market demands or other software-related factors.
  • Various DevOps tools assist the DevOps team in automating their processes and monitoring application performance.

 

What are DevOps Metrics?

  • DevOps metrics are data sets that directly reveal the performance of a DevOps software development pipeline. And further aids in the rapid identification and removal of bottlenecks. These metrics monitor the application’s technical capabilities and team proceedings.
  • DevOps metrics provide a holistic view of the impact and business value of DevOps’s success. By selecting the appropriate performance metrics, one can influence current DevOps initiatives and future production and technological decisions.

The following are the ten key DevOps metrics that can help businesses monitor the success rate of their apps:

1. Deployment frequency

Track the frequency of code deployment to get a clear picture of how quickly new features and capabilities roll out. This metric should remain stable or increase over time. A decrease or stutter indicates a bottleneck in the DevOps team workflow.

2. Deployment failure

Changes must be implemented smoothly, not just frequently. Maintain the lowest possible failure rate for application changes and releases deployed into production. Potential failures include a change that causes users to time out or entails a rollback for further work. Create a system for monitoring the success and failure of changes. A high rate of change failure impacts the application’s end users. It requires more time spent by administrators troubleshooting issues and fixing bugs rather than completing high-value initiatives.

3. Lead Time

If the goal is to ship code as quickly as possible, this is a critical DevOps metric. Lead time is the actual amount of time that passes between the start of a deliverable and its deployment. It informs you how long it would take to get a new product to manufacture if you start working on it today.

4. Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)

If it takes considerably longer to detect a problem, a low change in failure rate is insufficient. For example, if the mean time to detect is 30 days, it could take almost a month to diagnose the issue that causes failure rates to rise. As DevOps procedures are more established, MTTD ought to decrease with time. Expect the bottlenecks causing these current delays to later bring further congestion to the DevOps workflow if the MTTD increases. For security reasons, rapid detection of the problem proves beneficial as it limits the scope of an attack.

5. Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)

Mean time to recovery is another important DevOps metric that administrators should keep as low as possible. Remove problems as soon as you become aware of them. DevOps organizations adhere to the principle that frequent, incremental changes are easier to deploy and fix when something goes wrong. When a release contains a high degree of change and complexity, it becomes more difficult to identify and resolve issues. Several factors, including asset type, criticality, and age, influence what constitutes a world-class MTTR. An MTTR of less than five hours, on the other hand, is a good rule of thumb.

6. Application Performance rate

An unexpected surge in end users can cause performance issues at the infrastructure level. Storage bottlenecks, high memory consumption, CPU spikes and network latency are all consequences of increased application usage. Increasing end-user numbers may necessitate the installation of additional infrastructure. Performance drops without other end-user requests. It could also indicate that bugs or inefficient changes from development and release are slowing down the app. To ensure high availability and a positive end-user experience, verify and correct such errors without delay.

7. Usage and Traffic of Applications

Following a deployment, you should check if the number of transactions or users accessing your system appears normal. Something could go wrong if you witness no traffic or a massive spike in traffic. Zero traffic on your application is the last thing you want to see. Alternatively, if you’re using microservices and one of your applications generates a lot more traffic, you might notice a tremendous spike in it.

8. Application availability

Application availability is a metric used to determine whether an application is properly functioning and meets the needs of an individual or business. The availability is determined through application-specific key performance indicators (KPIs), such as overall or timed application uptime and downtime, the number of completed transactions, reliability, responsiveness, and other relevant factors.

9. Error rates

It is crucial to monitor error rates within your application. They indicate not only quality issues but also ongoing performance and uptime issues. Best practices for exception handling are critical for good software. Identify new exceptions in your code following a deployment. That is looking for any signs of bugs. Capture issues with database connections, query timeouts, and other related topics in production.

10. Change failure percentage

The total number of failed deployments is divided by the total number of deployments to yield the change failure percentage metric. Assume your team performs ten deployments per day. There were three return failures out of that total. This scenario has a 30% change failure rate. That is, 30% of the code changes must be fixed or reversed.

 

Did you know?

  1. 66% of the organizations surveyed have implemented DevOps for their applications.
  2. 16% of those organizations saw DevOps as a cost-cutting driver. 49% of the participants credited DevOps for their improved performance, faster market-time, and higher ROI (Return On Investment).
  3. 48% of respondents said the main reason they weren’t using DevOps was a lack of knowledge, while 33% said they didn’t have the right tools to implement it. 
  4. Version control systems are ranked first on the list of tools that support a DevOps initiative by 84% of those polled. Modern version control systems are the fundamental building blocks of any process involving automation, continuous integration, or delivery.

 

In a nutshell:

Today’s technology allows you to automate a wide range of tasks. DevOps is the collaboration of software development teams from various departments and locations. DevOps metrics, on the other hand, are a means of measuring the effectiveness of your team’s collaboration and a step toward business advancement.

 

DevOps Tools That Aid In Your Organization

How can DevOps scale your D2C/B2C business? Amit Jain November 23, 2022

Scaling a firm is easier and less expensive with DevOps. With less labor, you may achieve massive economies of scale and higher throughput. By reducing human effort, automation can help your B2C and D2C businesses manage at a lesser cost and more efficiently. In most firms, continuous integration is a key area for progress. You may have a dozen or more systems, rather than relying on a single one. If those systems don’t communicate with one another, silos form, which exacerbates communication and management issues as your organization grows. 

“According to research, 60% less time is spent handling support cases by using DevOps rather than any Traditional Ops.”

Here is how leveraging DevOps can help you align customer business needs and requirements:

1 – Improved Customer Experience:

Customer input is always valuable since it aids firms in making adjustments and taking measures that improve the customer experience. This stage allows customers to immediately acknowledge your goods and assists you in making necessary improvements. Furthermore, customer feedback improves quality, lowers risks and costs, and streamlines the process from beginning to end. This ideology improves client engagement by allowing for the faster development of relevant applications. All apps are produced fast with the highest respect for client demands and desires, thanks to the joint work. End-users benefit from DevOps’ integrated cultural base, which offers them efficient and regular upgrades in order to optimize customer happiness.

2 – Faster Delivery:

Typically, the development team builds the code first, then tests it in a safe setting before handing it over to the operations team for production. The production process is slowed as a result of misunderstandings about infrastructure, configuration, deployment, log management, and monitoring since the two teams aren’t aligned

Companies can actually expedite delivery and reduce release time, because of synchronization brought in by DevOps. Furthermore, it enables early error detection, ensuring that code is always in a ready form. Companies can go to market in a timely manner and gain a competitive advantage as a result of the combined effects of all of these factors.

Reduces Failure Rate:

Living with the looming possibility of IT failure is harmful to a company’s reputation, especially if it affects the customer-facing side of the organization. Internally, they have the potential to hurt the company’s bottom line. DevOps minimizes failure rates while speeding up recovery times. This is largely owing to its iterative and continuous development style, which allows for modifications in the event of a crisis. Because of the shorter development cycle, DevOps encourages regular code versions. As a result, coding flaws are easily and quickly identified. Teams can apply agile programming techniques to reduce the number of implementation failures by utilizing their time. When development teams and activities collaborate to share ideas and grow together, it is easier to recover any losses caused by blunders.

Better Sales Numbers:

The purpose of enterprise DevOps isn’t to enable ten application deployments every day. It’s about achieving operational efficiencies and a more consistent, predictable, and repeatable operational environment. Companies can use this philosophy to automate repetitive processes without fear of making mistakes. Through periodic backups and rollovers, development can become more resilient and stable. Regression and performance testing can quickly bring about a tiny adjustment. Companies can save a lot of money if all of these functions are automated. If a company’s scale is large, this can result in huge financial benefits.

Conclusion: 

In D2C and B2C businesses, customers will be disappointed if your expansion leads it to stumble due to misunderstanding, ineffective working culture, miscommunication, or delivery capacity. Manual processes were good when you were just starting off. Now, they prevent you from moving quickly enough. Either you’ll be blowing things up or you’ll be hopelessly attempting to stay afloat. All of this is exhausting. Now is an excellent time to look at new DevOps Tools on the market that can save you time and money while allowing you to handle considerably higher volumes in all areas of your business.

Learn more in our video

What is DevOps – Introduction to Architecture & Benefits of DevOps Sumeet Shah June 14, 2022

What is DevOps?

The simplest way to introduce-DevOps is an approach for coalescing Development and Operations, and there could be various other ways to introduce it too. Broadly, it is a philosophy to ensure coordination between the development and the operations team. Facilitated by DevOps, agile development allows seamless integration and delivery. Leading to extremely productive ends, DevOps tools have proven results in increased production speed.

DevOps architecture is utilized for cloud-based applications as well as big distributed applications. Various components that are used in the architecture are: Development-Plan, Test, Code, Build; Operations- Release, Operate, Deploy, Monitor. DevOps allows both the departments to improve their productivity by allowing them to modify their flaws.

A well-implemented DevOps strategy has a lot of advantages. The following are a few of those that we chose to highlight:

1. Speed:

To become more productive at generating organizational outcomes, DevOps enables you to move at a high rate. This allows you to develop quicker for clients, and adapt well to the changing markets. Your development and operations teams can achieve these goals using the DevOps paradigm.

2. Continuous and Rapid Delivery:

Continuous delivery is the foundation of the DevOps. By increasing the number of releases and the frequency with which they are released, you can innovate and upgrade your product more quickly. The faster you deploy new features and solve bugs, the better you’ll be able to respond to your consumers’ needs and gain a competitive edge.

3. Decreased cost:

DevOps allows firms to keep their costs to a minimum, that is a key concern for corporations. These methods promote productivity, resulting in increased software production and lower overall production costs for enterprises.

4. Reliability:

 DevOps helps you sustain competition by maintaining the quality of application updates and infrastructure modifications. You can deliver at a faster rate while still providing a great customer experience. To ensure that each change is functional and safe, it uses approaches such as continuous integration and continuous delivery. Practices such as monitoring and logging allow you to keep track of performance in real time.

5. Improved collaboration:

 Development teams have more agility and produces at a faster pace in isolation. Operations teams find it difficult to keep up and are unable to release software at the same rate. However, DevOps brings these teams together and speeds up the delivery of software. It shortens the development timeline.

6. Customer Satisfaction:

The DevOps approach values user experience and, by design, user feedback. Because you’re focusing on smaller releases and there’s greater room for fast feedback, this naturally puts you in the shoes of the consumer.

When clients’ expectations and requirements are met, customer satisfaction reaches new heights by getting information from them and acting on it.

Conclusion:

The easiest way to get started with DevOps is to identify a small value stream and try out some practices. Transforming a single stream with a small number of stakeholders is much easier than trying to move your organization to a new way of working all at once. Now is the best time to explore this area!

Best DevOps Tools to Use in 2022 Sumeet Shah June 10, 2022

What is DevOps? DevOps is a set of tools and practices that bring together software development and operations, bridging the gap between the two. This approach is witnessing a rise in its demand due to provision of high quality software delivery on a continual basis. The aim behind using this approach is to make sure that flaws are reduced to the minimum and productivity is increased to the maximum. 

For this purpose, although there are a number of DevOps tools that are used in the market, few of them are exceptionally good namely, AWS, Jenkins, Terraform, and Kubernetes. These tools automate the process of software development by focusing primarily on collaboration and communication between the professionals with different roles and working in different teams. 

This blog will illustrate the best tools with their respective categories to use for DevOps processes:

1. Containers- Docker:

Containers are software development platforms that enable developers to create, test, and deploy products in resource-independent conditions. Each container contains the whole runtime environment, which includes the software, its modules, source code, settings, and all of its resources. Platforms for containers provide orchestration, automation, security, governance, and other functionalities. For fast application development and deployment, DevOps mainly relies on containerization, with Docker being the most extensively used container technology. The Docker engine was created to make developing, deploying, and managing containerized applications on single nodes easier. Docker is free and open-source software that works with cloud services and runs on Windows and Linux.

2. Infrastructure as Code (IaC)-Terraform:

Hashicorp developed Terraform as an open source tool to automate the provisioning of infrastructure resources. It supports all public and private cloud infrastructure provisioning like Networks, Servers, managed services, and Firewall. Infrastructure as a coding philosophy is used to create, manage, update, and destroy infrastructure resources such as virtual machines, containers, networking, and others. Terraform uses a notion called state files to keep track of the state of your infrastructure. HCL (Hashicorp configuration language) is Terraform’s own domain-specific language.

3. Container Orchestration System – Kubernetes:

Kubernetes is a prominent container orchestration platform and an open-source DevOps solution for automating the deployment and administration of containerized applications. To achieve effectiveness and quality in production, developers use Kubernetes to automate tasks like container initialization, scalability, communication, security, and more. Kubernotes is unique because it has the ability to heal itself. It makes modifications to your application or its setup while also monitoring its health. Rollouts and rollbacks get automated. It also provides a set of Pods with their own IP addresses and a single DNS name for Service Delivery and load balancing. 

4. Continuous Integration/Delivery (CI/CD)- Jenkins:

Jenkins is a Java-based open-source automation platform with plugins designed for Continuous Integration. If you want to integrate a certain tool, you need to install the tool’s plugins. It also enables you to deliver your software on a continuous basis by interacting with a variety of tests and deployment technologies. Jenkins, which was created by Kohsuke for Continuous Integration (CI), is now the most extensively used Continuous Delivery (CD) solution. It has thousand-plus plugins that allow it to integrate with almost any tool. Jenkins continues to gain traction as the most widely used continuous integration and delivery tool in the world.

Conclusion:

In order to actualize the benefits of DevOps, choosing the best tools is imperative. Right tools help realize the advantages by breaking down communication silos and improving productivity. It must be noted that it takes time to implement the culture shift and not just a night.

Why is DevOps Important? Challenges and Benefits of DevOps explained Sumeet Shah May 17, 2022

What is important is to focus on collaboration and reduction in barriers between development and operations. Equipping them with the DevOps tools and methods, they need to collaborate as a single interdisciplinary team that maximizes productivity with Automation, thereby optimizing the entire business process. 

Benefits of DevOps

You have a better chance of outrunning your competitors if you have a shorter time to market. DevOps allows you to deliver software faster because of optimized processes, proper automation, and methodical delivery management. This philosophy also enables the team to actively propose ground-breaking solutions and share their thoughts in actual time. The customer-centric attitude, continuous feedback, shorter product life cycles, and continual improvement lead to the most fulfilling outcomes.

DevOps does seem like a reasonable investment. The before mentioned advantages result in a measurable ROI for your company. In the long run, this approach will allow you to grow your revenue by accelerating your business velocity and competitiveness.

Few of the challenges faced by today’s highly competitive IT industry that are overcome to a great extent by adopting DevOps model are explained as follows:

1. Poor Feedback and Transparency:

The consumer is only introduced to the product at a later point due to predetermined discrete work stages. This results in significant discrepancies between the expected and delivered output, necessitating rework. Employees also fail to respond to user complaints in a timely manner. While those managing software development projects are frequently bombarded with status reports, they typically have little to no insight into actual progress. This is due to the fact that it concerns working software features and functionality rather than business productivity.

2. Collaboration and Communication Gap:

Traditional software development initiatives necessitate lengthy approval processes. As a result, management time can be lost because several permissions are necessary. This means that project delays are compounded by management delays. The division of the software developers, test engineers, and maintenance staff into three separate groups is solved by adopting the philosophy of DevOps.

3. Frequent Errors and Infrequent Updates:

Failure to communicate, along with a siloed departmental structure, results in an unorganized and time-consuming methodology, as well as defective products. Fixing a bug and making new changes and implementing them can take weeks or even months when there is no direct interaction between the testing engineers and developers. If a company consistently fails to execute projects on schedule, it will not advance in the market.

4. Insufficient Testing:

The tests are carried out individually in unit forms during this phase. These tests are insufficient to produce standard quality output in terms of increased functionality and proper problem detection. Due to organizational bottlenecks, test experts struggle to maintain a continuous testing process at each level of development. Due to these flaws, the teams face post-release faults that could have been avoided by continuous testing at each stage.

Conclusion: DevOps prioritizes the satisfaction of the customers by providing quick delivery of features and updates, making it a more preferred method than the traditional development model. The future will drive modifications in tooling and administrative strategies. Focus on cloud optimization will sharpen and automation will play a major role. The time is now.