In today’s business environment, ensuring fast-paced development and enabling shorter time-to-market are two of the most important elements in determining success.
A true DevOps culture can help your organization achieve this.
Oftentimes, it can be beneficial to turn to a skilled DevOps consultant to experience the full benefits of DevOps maturity.
Everything you need to know about DevOps consultants:
- What is Development Operations (DevOps)?
- What Does a DevOps Consultant Do?
- DevOps Activities & Tasks
- DevOps Tools
- DevOps Responsibilities & Services
- When Should You Engage With DevOps Consulting Services?
- How Can A DevOps Consultant Help Your Business?
- Types of Projects DevOps Consultants Work On, With Examples
What Is Development Operations (DevOps)?
DevOps, short for development operations, is a combination of tools, practices, and cultural philosophy that integrates processes between software development and operations activities in an organization.
Using a DevOps model removes traditional silos between the two teams and emphasizes cross-team collaboration, ultimately helping your organization to release the right products faster.
What Does a DevOps Consultant Do?
A DevOps consultant helps organizations effectively adopt tools and practices to increase efficiency within their development process. They often begin by assessing your organization, processes, and teams to determine the appropriate strategy, tools, and timeline for your needs and then provide a roadmap of a DevOps adoption strategy.
Once your organization begins adoption, the consultant will collaborate with you and your team to consistently monitor, manage, and optimize your software development lifecycle while also providing additional hands-on training and recommendations.
DevOps Activities & Tasks
- Strategy: Consultants will often create a DevOps roadmap assessing the organization’s current state, planning an approach to achieve the desired state, and identifying key milestones and KPIs.
- Automation: Through optimizing the CI/CD pipeline (continuous integration and continuous deployment), any changes that developers make to the code will be delivered to production automatically, reliably, and quickly.
- Security: DevSecOps incorporates “security” within DevOps, focusing on integrating security initiatives earlier in the software development lifecycle.
- Knowledge Sharing: For an investment to be valuable, it needs to be sustainable and lasting. DevOps consultants conduct knowledge-sharing with members of the organization to ensure they can continue to manage a process or solution upon its release.
DevOps tools used by consultants:
DevOps tools are used to help teams manage complexity at scale, automate manual tasks and improve velocity while maintaining control and robust monitoring. These DevOps tools can include:
- Terraform
- AWS CloudFormation
- Azure Bicep
- Kubernetes
- Docker
At AIM Consulting, we are technology agnostic. We focus on robust solutions and best practices that center on that value of Devops rather than products. We use a variety of tools to express configuration as code, reduce feedback latency and automate labor-intensive tasks.
Our approach and knowledge ensure that we deliver a solution that is custom-tailored to your organization’s needs.
DevOps Responsibilities & Services:
- Assessing and planning a DevOps roadmap
- Communicating between the development and operations teams to eliminate siloes, align the teams’ goals, and effectively implement a true DevOps culture
- Implementing scalable solutions including continuous delivery, monitoring, optimization, and release management
- Ensuring consistency in metadata across environments
- Automating the DevOps pipeline, including application performance monitoring, CI/CD cycles, and infrastructure and configurations
- Coding, scripting, and debugging issues in multiple languages, such as JavaScript, Ruby, and Python
- Demonstrating extensive knowledge of cloud providers, large hardware installations, modern continuous development and integration tools, and DevOps practices and methodologies
When Should You Hire a DevOps Consultant?
If you’re new to DevOps or struggling with your adoption, bringing on a DevOps consultant can be instrumental to ensuring your adoption is as seamless as possible.
Successfully adopting DevOps includes the blending of two separate teams, including their people, processes, and technology – if you lack the proper oversight, you’ll end up burning time and investment as your team struggles to figure out what to do.
6 Ways DevOps Consultants Can Help Your Business
- Building a strategy that aligns people with processes and technology to ensure your shift to DevOps actually sticks
- Increasing communication and collaboration between the development and operations teams
- Resolving technical delivery issues and stopping future implementation oversights to ensure your objectives drive value
- Implementing CI/CD to enable quick release of new features and to save time while simultaneously making your process more secure and profitable
- Providing expert guidance and assistance with coding, testing, monitoring, configuring, and optimizing
- Integrating and tightening security within the software development lifecycle
Types of Projects DevOps Consultants Work On, With Examples
The work of a DevOps consultant takes many shapes. Let’s look at one of the AIM Consulting team’s previous experiences as an example of the type of projects DevOps consultants are often tasked with. For a more detailed look, please head to our DevOps transformation case study.
Example of DevOps Consulting Project:
The eServices division of a company had been using Agile/Scrum for years, but automation was limited and roles and responsibilities were confused, resulting in duplicate effort and other inefficiencies. Due to a lack of communication between teams, frustration pervaded the organization.
AIM’s experts performed an assessment of the organization’s current state and conducted deep research by observing current development and operations processes and interviewing 20+ personnel at every level in the eServices division.
Our experts then crafted a detailed, five-phase roadmap to help the division reach full DevOps maturity with predictable stability across all environments.
As a result of the custom-fit DevOps strategy and roadmap, complete with a vision, measurable goals, and actionable recommendations, the eServices division saw immediate value.
Successful execution of the fifth phase meant a transformation from DevOps to NoOps, where optimization is built into testing and automation to the point that operations is “hands off” in the deployment process.
The realized transformation would result in:
- Improved product
- Happier teams
- Significant efficiency gains
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Need DevOps Support?
A successful DevOps transformation increases software delivery velocity and builds shared ownership among software stakeholders. At AIM Consulting, we offer expert guidance at every phase of your DevOps journey, from strategy and roadmap development, to implementation, to optimization and NoOps automation.
Contact us today or learn more about our DevOps maturity services at the link below.
