The best tools for creating your DevOps Implementation Roadmap in 2023

A DevOps implementation roadmap is imperative for CIOs (Chief Information Officers) in any organization committed to taking a strategic approach toward its DevOps success.

A systematic DevOps roadmap offers CIOs a holistic view which helps them better cater to customer demands, enhance their products and gain a competitive edge in the market. Organizations also achieve their business-centric goals faster with a roadmap in place.

DevOps is not a 1-day process but a collaborative culture or mindset that eliminates bottlenecks from traditional software development workflows. It aims to accelerate the SDLC, make processes more efficient and seamlessly promote team collaboration across business organizations.

The DevOps model allows Development and Ops teams to come together and work efficiently during the entire SDLC, right from the beginning. 

For a successful DevOps transformation, CIOs must have the following aspects in place:

• CI (Continuous Integration): This approach helps organizations detect issues beforehand, recover faster and retain quality while ensuring faster product turn-around times.
• CD (Continuous Delivery): The CD approach ensures software upgrades are released promptly to attain precision and mitigate deployment risks. This enhances software quality, helps resolve bugs early, and reduces the timeframe of new releases.
• Microservices: Leveraging microservices better resolves scripting or configuration problems to ensure a seamless deployment process.
• IaaC (Infrastructure as a Code): IaaC approach simplifies the management of large-scale resources such as networking infrastructure, servers, storage systems, etc.
• Automated Configuration Management: Platform automation services, along with code management, simplify configuration, centralize management of all operations, and enhance the quality of code.

Why adopt a DevOps methodology?

Developers and system admins have a unified objective of catering to the requirements of their patrons. Generally, these include quality products/services, new features, timely upgrades, secure, reliable, stable system performance, and fewer interruptions/system outages. 

The DevOps methodology aims to strike a perfect balance between development and operations, creating a secure, highly stable, and efficient production environment. It bridges the gap between ‘Dev’ and ‘Ops’ people by promoting automation and seamless collaboration.

The DevOps culture integrates the software development team with the operations team, including security engineers, testing engineers, QA, system admins, developers, and more. They all work together in a collaborative, automated environment to attain a common business goal - accelerate SDLC, ensure IT integrity and stability and deliver high-quality software that meets the customers’ demands.

Business Benefits of DevOps Implementation:

A well-thought-out, systematic DevOps implementation strategy offers a clear-cut, holistic view to Development and Ops teams, allowing them to abolish siloed operations, understand domain technicalities better, and derive a common ground to meet varied business goals.

Here are some of the top business benefits of DevOps implementation:

1. Enhanced Collaboration

DevOps methodology creates a highly stable, automated collaboration environment for both teams to offer transparency, shared roles and responsibilities, and instantaneous feedback. This approach discards siloed functioning of both teams, instigating trust, and better understanding within a collaborative environment.

2. High performance

Siloed developers’ groups and individual operations often found in traditional production environments lead to non-transparency, operational inefficiencies, decreased software performance, and redundancy due to working with a singular piece of code. That’s where DevOps comes in!

A DevOps approach introduces frequent releases, early detection of issues, timely system recovery, fewer last-hour errors/bugs, and an accelerated SDLC - ultimately resulting in faster TTM (time-to-market).

3. Better Quality Products

DevOps methodology accelerates the SDLC (Software Development LifeCycle) by leveraging automation services and an innovative DevOps toolchain. This helps organizations identify market trends and demands and better cater to user needs.

Organizations can speed up time-to-market with an agile transformation roadmap by cutting down the production cycle.

4. Cut down production costs

DevOps methodology unifies the management of operations, new releases, and timely upgrades. This results in reduced production costs.

5. Business Agility

DevOps culture promotes seamless collaboration, interactions, and efficient workflows between teams, regardless of their geolocation. Such a DevOps approach enhances business agility, helping you improve customer service delivery.

6. Stability, security, and reliability of systems

DevOps practices and tools leverage automation and innovative notions such as real-time monitoring, CI/CD, IaaC (Infrastructure as a Code), etc., to ensure the system retains its stability, security, and reliability. This boosts customer satisfaction as it delivers seamless user experiences.

7. Scalability

DevOps makes it easier to run and manage infrastructure and development processes at scale by leveraging various cloud resources and services. Automation, efficiency, and consistency are core aspects that allow you to easily manage complicated, rapidly-evolving systems with fewer risks in the long run.

8. Security 

DevSecOps is a crucial part of DevOps methodology that inculcates ‘security’ into the software development pipeline from the beginning to the end. Security is not the responsibility of the security engineer alone. Rather, every person associated with the SDLC is responsible for security. This approach empowers enterprises to identify security challenges earlier, trace them to the source and resolve them before they filter through to end users.

Ultimately, the DevSecOps culture leverages granular access control, automated compliance policies, and enhanced configuration management.

9. Customer Satisfaction Rate

As DevOps accelerates SDLC, both teams get plenty of time to collect feedback consistently from users, monitor different stages of software progress, and adopt necessary changes.

This continuous cycle of gathering instantaneous feedback and bringing about new changes as per user demands boosts their satisfaction level. Not to mention, this ultimately contributes to customer loyalty as well.

10. Competitive Edge in the Market

Keeping up with the rapidly changing market demands and new trends is the key to success.

DevOps infrastructure helps you employ high-end functionalities in software, release products faster and take proper security measures throughout. This gives you a competitive edge over players still caught up in the traditional development environment.

What infrastructure is essential for a DevOps implementation journey?

To achieve your implementation goals faster, it is crucial to leverage the right DevOps infrastructure automation toolchain.

However, no single tool effectively handles all parts of the DevOps lifecycle. Organizations need to leverage various specialized DevOps automation tools that cater to different organizational needs - configuration management, code deployments, monitoring, automated builds, server provisioning, and so much more.

The DevOps toolchain can be categorized into five core groups as per the objective it caters to in the DevOps pipeline:

1. DevOps CI (Continuous Integration)/ Deployment Tools

Instant feedback is the key to successfully employing CI processes with integrated build and automated testing. 

Robust CI/CD tools are a critical part of infrastructure automation. Some of the best ones are:

• Convox: An innovative PaaS tool that you can leverage to deploy, scale and manage applications and infrastructure across clouds. It is a well-integrated platform that automates deployment workflows and features role-based access control, and provides 360-degree visibility into the DevOps pipeline.
• Jenkins: A Java-based CI tool that accelerates application delivery. It easily integrates with version control systems like SVN or GitHub, to build and test new code whenever it is pushed to a code repository.
• Docker: Docker leverages process-level virtualization and creates siloed application environments called containers. These containers can be transmitted to any server without making any changes to the application.
• CircleCI
• Bamboo
• Travis CI

2. DevOps Continuous Monitoring Tools

Continuous Monitoring tools are one of the critical elements of infrastructure automation. These tools help you derive key metrics and insights to make informed decisions about remediation, alerts, upgrades, scaling, and more.

These tools track network traffic, automatically fix issues, and regularly update maintenance schedules.

Some of the best infrastructure monitoring tools are:

• Prometheus (Open-source)
• New Relic (SaaS solution for application monitoring)
• Sensu (ruby-based, open-source monitoring framework)
• Datadog (SaaS application and server monitoring platform)
• AppDynamics
• Nagios
• Splunk

3. DevOps Configuration Management Tools

Configuration Management tools power business agility by configuring applications within the server. They simplify complicated tasks, leveraging continuous testing and CD (Continuous Delivery). The best configuration practices are employed across the entire production environment, even across dynamic workflows. 

Some of the best configuration management tools are:

• Ansible (agentless configuration management/orchestration tool)
• Chef (open-source configuration management tool)
• Kubernetes (production-grade, open-source container orchestration platform)

4. Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) tools

IaaC tools enable you to automate and manage all infrastructure resources such as networks, servers, applications, firewalls, cloud/on-prem managed services, and so much more.

Here are a few best IaaC tools in the market:

• Ansible (open-source platform for configuration management, software provisioning, and deployment, thus enabling IaaC)
• Chef
• Terraform (cloud-agnostic infrastructure provisioning tool)
• Pulumi
• Saltstack
• Puppet

5. DevOps Version Control Tools

DevOps version control tools are as follows:

• Git
• GitHub

Key Takeaways

With this, we conclude our detailed insights into the DevOps transformation roadmap, its objectives, business benefits, and the best DevOps toolchain. 

To summarize, all the DevOps tools mentioned in this post are crucial to DevOps success as they serve specialized purposes in various stages of the DevOps pipeline - build, CI/CD, configuration management, testing, and version control system, monitoring, etc.

• Leverage well-integrated powerful DevOps deployment tools such as Convox to automate deployment, management, and scaling of your applications.
• Choose the proper DevOps toolchain to simplify large-scale infrastructure and processes with minimal errors.
• Have a precise DevOps implementation roadmap to get a holistic view of all your DevOps processes, operations, resources, architecture, roles, toolchains, and other technicalities.