Have you included a StatusHub in your DevOps Strategy

Over the last two years, more and more organisations have started to embrace DevOps. But, why now? Traditionally DevOps has been the domain of early It adopters. Could this be because we are seeing more myths about DevOps being debunked on a regular basis?
DevOps is now the most widely adopted methodology in the development world. According to the 2016 State of the Cloud report by RightScale 70% of SMB’s had adopted DevOps as had 81% of enterprises. However, with such a rapid adoption rate does everyone involved fully understand what is involved or are they just taking it up because it is new and shiny.
If you believe you are ready to adopt a DevOps methodology, having the technical knowledge is not enough you must be willing to acclimatise to the culture too. Without embracing the culture that comes with adopting the DevOps, it will lead to some complications when it comes to communication and collaboration.
Culture Before All Else.
As with any software methodology, Devops consists of 5 key fundamentals.
- Values,
- Principles,
- Tools,
- Processes,
- and Practices.
More often than not companies focus their attention on the last three, yet many of the issues they face will arise from the first two.
First and foremost, DevOps is a cultural change, to successfully implement any DevOps tool., everybody involved needs to care about the development and delivery life cycle. This includes everything from deployment to quality assurance and everything in between and not just the part they are responsible for. The tools you use should be selected to help support this culture.
A trap many companies have fallen into when adopting the DevOps approach is to implement the tools first thinking that this will allow them to hit the ground running, leading them to believe they can shoehorn the culture needed in at a later date. However, adopting tools without ensuring everyone from development to operations is prepared to use them and ready to embrace the change they will bring can make thing complicated and even counterproductive.
Don’t Rush In
DevOps places emphasis on communication, collaboration, and automation, to make infrastructure changes and software delivery easier. The current hype surrounding DevOps may tempt you to go all and implement every new approach.
Quoting Elvis, “Only Fools Rush In”. Implementing a new approach without being 100% sure why it is needed will only leave everybody involved in a technical mess. To avoid that egg on your face sensation, as a company you need to analyse your pain points, and only implement DevOps processes where you need them most.
The last two years have shown us that DevOps is set to become a mainstream IT methodology, and from where I am sitting, this is a good thing. However, just be it is new and shiny, and everybody else is doing it should not be the reason you look to “implement DevOps.”
With an investment of time, leadership, finance and talent from the start, you can accelerate application delivery, quickly fine tune systems for improvement and help your business reach higher levels of availability and agility.
Reduce Waste
Implemented correctly, a DevOps Strategy will help you reduce waste within your company. This could take the form of poorly managed resources or inefficient process. In an article for AppDynamics in 2015, John Rakowski concisely explains this in the context of application monitoring.
As he focuses on monitoring tools and how they can help a business reduce waste he does not consider: Downtime Communication. How downtime communication is handled can easily be a culprit of mismanaged resources and inefficient process. This should lead you to ask:
- Who takes responsibility for communicating the incident to customers?
- How are other teams within the company notified of the disruption and when full functionality is restored?
StatusHub Can Help
With a StatuHub in place, it will support the DevOps team by handling communication during time sensitive incidents. StatusHub enables your customers and colleagues to subscribe to updates via Twitter, Email and SMS so that they receive alerts when your application or website is not functioning as intended.
We offer both incident and maintenance templates providing you with the opportunity to work in collaboration with marketing, to craft alerts ahead of time. Keeping messages consistent and ensures that any subscriber to your StatusHub who is not tech-savvy can understand what is happening. Connecting your StatusHub to your monitoring tool will allow you to update your hub as issues arise automatically. This keeps your DevOps team focused on identifying, investigating and resolving the issue at hand.
With the StatuHub in place, you will adopt an environment of continuous improvement, a key element of the DevOps culture.
Learn more about how StatusHub can help improve your organisation.

