DevOps at Elements

Every now and then a new buzzword pops up that seems to stick around. DevOps is one of those words, but what is it exactly? Ask three people what it is and you will get four different answers. What most people agree on is that DevOps is the bridge between the development and operations teams in order to improve communication and collaboration between the two. DevOps also fits perfectly in the Agile philosophy.

Traditionally, the development team delivers a product and hands it over to operations for deployment to the production environment and making sure things continue to run smoothly. As operations is typically not involved in the development process of a product, issues that may arise after deployment may not be so easy to resolve by the operations team. Also, when assistance from developers is required, the development team might already have moved on to the next project.

The goal of DevOps is what is often described as breaking down the team silos, where silos refer to a traditional setup where roles are functionally organized (development, QA, support, etc.). DevOps seeks to create cross-functional teams where everyone works closely together and everyone owns the overall business goals. This collaboration could mean that developers help in setting up a production machine, testers create unit test scripts themselves and system administrators assist in source code bug hunting. Furthermore, DevOps strives to automate anything that can be automated and to provide tools for continuous delivery and deployment.

That’s the theory.

So how are we doing DevOps at Elements?

We never had a strict “operations” team or very strong defined team silos. Also, we did already have cross-functional teams and had developers, for example, working on continuous integration and deployment tools.

Nevertheless we did form a “DevOps group” earlier this year at Elements. While CI and deployment tools were already organized, we wanted to setup a structural solution for the things that were sometimes falling between the cracks, were done irregularly or without a plan. These things include for example researching new tools, monitoring of metrics after the live release of an app, tracking App Store user reviews and keeping an eye on the server load of a tv show’s website that is broadcasting at the same time.

In our DevOps group of about six people we brought together development, system administration, support desk and QA. Literally together, because they are sitting together at the same desk now. Together this group of wonderful people handles incoming requests, optimizes tools for CI and deployment, monitors logs and keeps an eye on application metrics — while still doing their regular jobs. A daily standup keeps everybody in the loop about each other’s DevOps activities and upcoming releases.

Our ultimate goal is to make the people in the DevOps group interchangeable for any DevOps task and to slowly spread the DevOps love throughout the whole company.

We are still learning and improving, but we already see things working for us. Please share your experiences!

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Originally published at www.elements.nl on May 19, 2015.