Digital Transformation is ubiquitous, look anywhere and you will find how fast the digital world is evolving. Of course, businesses have to keep pace with these changes and development to stay ahead in the competition and accelerate their growth. They are already adopting multi-cloud strategies to make their enterprises more flexible to host varied applications. They are making the best of agile methodologies and principles in application development and deployment along with using various other tools, such as automated testing, continuous deployment, and more.
The aim is to create a strong digital foundation that optimally brings together legacy apps and infrastructure along with next-gen workloads. Whether customers are seeking cloud computing consulting services or other IT solutions, they want their applications to be deployed faster, at times, in less than an hour. They have high expectations from developers and system integrators to deliver a continuous mode of operations, be it integration, development, testing, improvement, etc. Hence, Agile Operations or AgileOps comes into the picture, enhancing IT infra operations.
AgileOps: An Overview
Before we get familiar with the concept of AgileOps, it’s important to understand what an Agile framework is. We are sure that most of you must have heard about agile methods and approaches when it comes to product engineering services. If you are not clear about it, then here is a brief explanation. Agile is the ability to develop, create, and respond according to the changes and evolution to achieve success in this uncertain and disrupted IT environment. This was the primary factor that the founders of Agile methodology included in their innovative and new method of software development. The agile approach prioritizes customer satisfaction through continuous and early delivery of seamless and valuable software products. However, attaining this goal is not easy and the process must adhere to a few principles, which are:
- Customer collaboration over contract rules and negotiation
- Interaction and customers over tools and processes
- Keeping up with changes over sticking to plan
- Effective software over comprehensive documentation
It focuses more on flexibility, communication, functionality than time-consuming processes, and planning. Therefore, agile teams can deliver competitive and functional software products faster.
Now, coming to AgileOps. It stands for Agile Operations, a term often used by developers and designers of IT companies. However, its definition may vary as some use the term simply to refer to an application developed using agile principles to run operations. On the other hand, some use it as a synonym to DevOps. The best way is to use AgileOps as an umbrella term for agile methods for development and operations along with applications of the agile method.
To define broadly, AgileOps is a trending IT operating model introduced for digital businesses and combines Agile methodologies with an agile way of working. Using this method, operations, and IT infrastructure teams master operations, deployment, and support services for digital products and applications that are developed in continuous delivery environments. Yes, many enterprises and companies have enhanced their application development and lifecycle management through agile principles and methods. However, for infrastructure operations, these organizations must go through a structural and cultural transformation. This will be possible by adopting DevOps where Development and Operations come together with a common objective of delivering top-notch and high-performing apps faster while ensuring stability and uptime.
Key to Achieving AgileOps
Although Agile is popular and a significant concept for IT companies, many still fail to achieve it efficiently and effectively. Why? Because they lack correct guidance and roadmap. Therefore, we have mentioned a few steps that will guide you through the process and help you attain AgileOps in your enterprise. Take a look:
- To start with implementing AgileOps, the first step is to focus on individuals and changes rather than tools. If you want to set up, operate, and maintain resilient digital infrastructure, then people are as important as the process and environment. You simply cannot ignore them. Hence, the development and operations team must embrace product-team thinking. Here, the entire team consisting of a project manager, UI/UX designers, developers, etc. must focus on user-experience and customer-centric features enhancement while providing digital and app development services.
- The operations team must extend its support and deliver complex infrastructure which means that critical platforms will require ongoing maintenance, such as storage, networking, monitoring, cloud operations, and continuous delivery. Also, these platforms must be automated and have self-provisioned interfaces for an excellent user experience that meets customer expectations. Of course, this requires a team with end-to-end accountability to manage the underlying platform. These team members are called platform operators or full-stack engineers.
- Another important aspect and core principle of the Agile approach is continuous improvement. Organizations must emphasize process improvement and must evolve with the changing trends in the sector. Many companies often complete their tasks with hand-offs between groups. This only causes unnecessary delays and multiple hops whenever a request is processed from one resource group to another. Of course, this leads to increasing wait times. AgileOps eliminates these delays through cross-functional teams. They reduce process hand-offs by handling incidents completely.
- The agile model also assists the IT operations team by providing them with a high level of visibility. These approaches put all the tasks and requests on a board and streamline the workflow. AgileOps also centralizes the requests and offers easy access to real-time tracking. This is not it. The operations team can be protected from all the chaos and innumerable interruptions that are caused due to unplanned work. Also, if the team is facing a production issue and working on developing a new feature, then there are chances of backlogs and prioritization problems. This is where Agile frameworks help by tackling work and meeting for a project throughout.
Conclusion
AgileOps are here to stay and enterprises must be quick to adopt it and include it in their IT and digital infrastructure. This will not only help them keep up with the changes but also ensure the best performance and quality services.