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DevOps Culture and Practices for Business Success

DevOps delivers tremendous business value, but requires major cultural and process changes. As an Atlassian Solution Provider, Atlas Bench provides the expertise and support needed to successfully adopt DevOps using the Atlassian Open DevOps platform. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore how Atlas Bench and Atlassian Open DevOps can help you implement DevOps best practices.

The Promise of DevOps

DevOps revolutionizes software development by unifying dev and ops teams. This collaboration enables organizations to release features faster, resolve issues quicker, deliver higher quality code, and improve customer satisfaction. However, simply adopting DevOps tools is not enough. You need to embrace key DevOps philosophies:

Collaboration – Break down silos between dev and ops teams. Foster alignment through shared goals and visibility. Remove blockers to communication and make sure all team members have context on the big picture vision.

Automation – Automate manual, repetitive processes to improve efficiency, consistency and reliability. Machines are great at doing rote tasks over and over without mistakes. Let humans focus their energy on creative, strategic work.

Continuous delivery – Release smaller code increments frequently versus big, infrequent releases. Deliver value constantly rather than in huge batch updates. Continuous delivery de-risks releases by making each change small.

Monitoring – Track metrics across systems to get fast feedback on performance. Monitoring provides the visibility needed to optimize systems and react quickly if issues emerge.

Feedback loops – Use telemetry data to continuously improve deployments and releases. Short feedback loops allow rapid iteration for both technical systems and team processes.

Core DevOps Practices

While DevOps requires changing organizational culture, there are concrete practices teams can implement:

Adopt Agile Frameworks

Transitioning to Agile emphasizes building software iteratively and incrementally in sprints. Work is broken down into manageable chunks prioritized by business value. Atlas Bench helps teams implement Agile using Atlassian Jira to manage sprints, visualize workflow using boards, track progress with burndown charts, run retrospectives to identify improvements, and more. Jira provides transparency into teamwork and helps align priorities across the organization.

Implement Continuous Integration

Continuous integration means frequently merging code changes from multiple developers into a shared code repository. Each integration automatically triggers an automated build and test process to catch issues immediately. Atlas Bench facilitates continuous integration through Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines which runs builds, tests, and code quality checks on every commit. Developers get instant detailed feedback if tests fail or quality thresholds are not met, allowing them to fix problems right away before bad code gets merged.

Enable Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery extends continuous integration by automating the release process all the way through production. Instead of manual deployments, code is automatically built, tested, approved, and promoted to staging and prod environments. The Atlassian platform supports continuous delivery through release pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, approvals, and rollbacks. Automated deployment pipelines enable teams to safely release hourly or daily versus monthly.

Monitor Continuously

Continuous monitoring means going beyond just monitoring infrastructure to tracking key performance metrics across systems, applications, logs, and more. This provides the holistic visibility needed to optimize performance and react quickly if issues emerge. Atlas Bench leverages Atlassian Statuspage for organization-wide monitoring so teams can resolve operational incidents before customers are impacted. Visibility is key for rapid diagnosis and remediation.

Optimize Feedback Loops

Short, tight feedback loops across teams and systems enable rapid iteration and higher quality. Atlas Bench seamlessly integrates Atlassian code quality tools into the developer workflow to provide rapid feedback on code health and security during the development process. Developers get notified immediately of issues like style violations or vulnerabilities. Rapid feedback during coding, testing, and monitoring accelerates issue resolution.

The Atlassian Open DevOps Platform

Atlas Bench strategically leverages tools across Atlassian’s Open DevOps platform to provide all the capabilities required for successful DevOps:

Complete visibility – Atlassian tools provide end-to-end visibility and traceability across your entire DevOps toolchain. Teams can easily track an issue or feature from inception all the way to delivery.

Cross-team collaboration – Atlassian offers a suite of collaboration tools including Jira, Confluence, Statuspage, and Slack integrations that connect development and operations teams. Atlassian breaks down silos that impede communication and alignment.

Automation – Bitbucket Pipelines and Terraform automate manual processes related to testing, building, deploying, and infrastructure provisioning. Automation improves efficiency, reduces human errors, and enforces consistency.

Accelerated feedback loops – Tight integrations between Atlassian tools close feedback loops across teams, activities, and systems. Bugs and issues are identified rapidly so they can be fixed immediately.

Enterprise scale – Atlassian tools easily scale to support large globally distributed teams and massive event volumes. You get improved DevOps without sacrificing enterprise security and control.

Compliance – Atlassian provides tools to help teams address compliance requirements around access controls, auditing, and data residency when operating in regulated industries like financial services or healthcare.

Flexibility – An open platform supports custom integrations for your existing tools while still providing out-of-the-box DevOps capabilities. Evolve your tech stack over time.

Actionable analytics – Atlassian products provide insightful analytics and reporting to help optimize processes, identify improvements, and demonstrate DevOps ROI.

Accelerating Your DevOps Transformation

Migrating to a fully DevOps model can seem overwhelming. Trying to implement continuous delivery when releases are currently infrequent and painful quickly leads to frustration. Adopting dozens of new tools results in disconnected tool sprawl versus an integrated toolchain. Luckily Atlas Bench can provide guidance and hands-on support to successfully adopt DevOps on Atlassian tools. Our DevOps consultants take an incremental approach focused on quick wins, continuous improvement, and long-term transformation:

Assess your maturity – We start by thoroughly evaluating your current capabilities, culture, processes, and tools. This assessment provides a baseline to measure progress.

Create a strategic roadmap – Working together, we create a data-driven roadmap for improving capabilities prioritized by business impact. The roadmap provides a guide for where to start and iterate.

Architect a custom solution – Atlas Bench then maps out a comprehensive Atlassian toolchain tailored to your specific needs and integrating your existing systems.

Provide training – We conduct extensive training and change management enablement so your teams can hit the ground running on new Atlassian tools.

Offer ongoing support – As you scale Atlassian usage, Atlas Bench provides highly responsive support and expertise to answer questions 24/7.

Continuous improvement – We check in regularly to fine-tune processes, expand use cases, and drive adoption to fully realize the Atlassian advantage.

Get Started Today

DevOps delivers real business results like faster time-to-market, improved quality, and lower costs. But transitioning to DevOps requires the right expertise, technology, and support. Atlas Bench and Atlassian Open DevOps provide the proven formula for DevOps success. Contact Atlas Bench today to start your DevOps journey! We offer flexible solutions tailored to fit your unique needs and budget. Get started with a free assessent or request a quote. Our DevOps consultants are ready to help accelerate your transformation.