Practical DevOps in the Enterprise

Author: Richard Fennell , CTO of Black Marble, Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies.

When considering what practical DevOps means we have to look at what we're trying to achieve in any software development process. We rarely write software for fun, its usually written for a specific business purpose and so the key guiding light needs to be whether there is return on investment (ROI) given the development efforts required.

Modern DevOps processes are a key factor in this ROI equation. The choice of process tooling can greatly change the cost of delivery on a project and so alter the ROI equation. Modern tools can make projects that in the past may have not been cost effective become viable.

These efficiencies can present themselves as reducing delivery time, reducing rework, or reducing tooling/system costs.

Cloud computing is often the key factor in changing the technological landscape. There is the obvious usage of running production workloads in the cloud, but the options do not end there.

Many organisations have already taken the choice to move their core DevOps tooling to the cloud by moving from products like GitHub Enterprise Server to GitHub Enterprise Services or Azure DevOps Server /TFS to Azure DevOps Services. Moving to a cloud hosted version of a tool they already use.

The key advantage of using these cloud hosted versions is that they are always kept up to date by the vendor, thus removing the cost of running your own servers and the cost of doing being regular updates. Updates which were often not done thus leaving key service vulnerable

Tools on their own will not provide a good DevOps solution. However, they can be critical to enabling your team to adopt the best practises and hence deliver code efficiently is possible. Opening up new business opportunities.

Richard has so much more to say around Tooling and Practical DevOps in the Enterprise - join him in the first of Black Marble's Autumn Webinar series, on the 18th October at 11am. And check out the other events we're running from now until January - including a GitHub CoPilot workshop in Manchester!

Join Black Marble as we share our knowledge and learnings in our series of webcasts and take advantage of our excellent white papers to help understand best practice for our industry. Contact [email protected] for any of our Essential Guide to the Cloud white papers, including “Delivering an Enterprise Cloud Operating Model”, “Successful Software Delivery with DevOps”, and “Business Process Automation and Integration in the Cloud” or to be kept informed as each new paper is published.