Delivering Value: Harnessing DevOps
Melanie Howes, DevOps & InfoSec Manager, Vistatec
As a language service provider, Vistatec must focus on providing value to customers. That value lies in the efficient and cost-effective delivery of localization services. From a customer perspective, materials are handed off to us, we then perform our “magic” and deliver back the materials localized as requested. The “magic” that happens is usually invisible to the customer. This document describes the processes by which some of that “magic” happens.
The role of Vistatec’s Applied Technology Group (ATG) is to ensure the organization has the appropriate tools with which to deliver services to customers. Sometimes that will involve developing bespoke tooling,
for example to create interconnectors between systems to ensure the efficient flow of materials through the localization process. ATG harness the power of DevOps for this process.
The aim of DevOps is the fast and efficient provision of software via a multi-functional team aligned to the overall value chain. It includes the totality of the software development life-cycle, from customer request to customer usage of the software. It is this customer focus that appeals to ATG.
DevOps is a natural successor to the agile methodologies already used in much software development. Agile methodologies enabled software development to become more reactive to change requests, moving away from the traditional “waterfall” style of development to a more dynamic style based around iterative development sprints, with feature request backlogs and progress visualised in burndown charts.
While agile is very much focused on the development process, DevOps goes further by including the QA, delivery and deployment stages in its remit. Progress centres on software being deployed and used by the customer. The DevOps team includes developers, QA specialists and IT Operations personnel.
This is where DevOps acquired its name – a combination of Development and Operations by the collaboration of developers and IT Operations. This is not without its challenges.
The two groups often have seemingly opposing goals within an organization: Development provides business value through the creative process of software feature development; IT Operations provides business value through ensuring infrastructure stability and security.
A key tenet of DevOps is that these two goals are not opposites and that they can be merged to ensure development is creative and responsive whilst also ensuring the products created are stable and secure. The key to this collaboration is automation. Every reliable, repeatable, stable and secure process contains some element of automation.
Within DevOps, we can use appropriate tooling and automation to help control and provide metrics for:
• Source control
• Unit testing
• Code quality
• Testing coverage
• Integration testing
• User interface testing
• Infrastructure creation and patching
• Performance testing
• System configuration
• Application monitoring
We can control the deployment process by including quality gates or performance tests that must pass before the application can be deployed. All of this deployment pipeline can be scripted and those scripts also stored in source control. This provides the DevOps team with the consistency and repeatability required to provide excellent service to the customer whilst ensuring the stability and security of the underlying infrastructure. In working with Vistatec, you can be assured of our speed of delivery, our commitment to quality and the robustness of our software.
Let the “magic” begin!