A Comprehensive Guide to DevOps Managed Services

The current IT landscape necessitates faster development and delivery of software products as well as better collaboration between IT and operations teams. While DevOps offers the exact methodology for this, its implementation for the full automation of the software deployment pipeline requires optimal management of the processes and resources involved.

Ensuring higher product velocity with DevOps requires constant monitoring, improvements in cloud resource allocation, well-configured disaster recovery practices, optimization of costs, and other services. Meanwhile, only 11% of respondents in a recent enterprise survey could confirm that they had achieved a thorough implementation of DevOps.

The full implementation of DevOps which is referred to as DevOps Managed Services is the only way to achieve high-quality software development with lightspeed time-to-market. In this article, we will delve deep into the many services that provide much-needed support for a complete and effective DevOps approach. 

The following are the DevOps Managed Services leveraged by the most successful enterprise software providers:

1)24*7 Infrastructure Support

DevOps implementation requires continuous infrastructure support at a series of points along the software development pipeline:

• It requires the IT organizational support paradigm of the three-tier hierarchy; L1, the frontline facing customer queries directly, L2, the tier with the more specialized skills and Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), and L3, part of the application development team assigned to individual applications or services.
• The support team enables end-to-end visibility across the whole software development lifecycle by leveraging third-party monitoring and analytics tools.
• Push gateways and alert managers are utilized for the closing of short-term tasks and handling alerts.
• DevOps teams also rely on machine learning technology for incident management to identify issues and stick to SLAs.
  

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2)Application Deployment, Configuration & Performance Monitoring

This step provides services to the majority of the software development lifecycle including the architecture design, setting up of environments and other configurations, and performance metrics. The components under the umbrella of this managed service include:

• Deployment support involves setting up automation for infrastructure management and deployment by developing the requisite scripts.
• The necessary resources for deployment can be requested to be provisioned on demand, and approved configuration changes can then be deployed immediately to a running software system.
• The deployment architectures and environments are set up using configuration data files provisioned in the cloud.
• Access levels are designed and permissions are granted through security groups to control authorized access to infrastructure services.
• Granular details of incidents and performance metrics are monitored to identify issues and proactively take corrective actions.
• Infrastructure and application services are tagged with metadata to identify resources correctly and then optimize performance.
• The entire DevOps pipeline is monitored in real-time to reduce system downtime, improve the customer experience and boost business credibility and response times with better CPU and disk space utilization. 

3)Incident Analysis & Resolution

DevOps teams prioritize incident management processes to enable better transparency with continuous improvements and faster resolutions in the incident lifecycle. This is done in the following ways:

• Incidents that involve brief outages or repetitive issues are resolved by L1 support teams without any escalations.
• Based on frameworks such as ITIL as well as the previous incident resolutions, teams prepare user guides, and technical documents defining the best practices and escalation policies.
• In DevOps incident management teams, there is very little differentiation between developers and sysadmins to enable continuous incident routing and resolution.
• Application usage dashboards and reports are designed to present a blameless postmortem analysis of the incidents.
• After incident redressal, root cause analysis is carried out. DevOps root cause analysis identifies the patterns, complexities, and behaviors that led to incidents while also ensuring blameless collaboration and communication to address future issues better.

4)Backup & Disaster Recovery:

DevOps facilitates simplified Disaster Recovery (DR) by often automating the DR process to future-proof against regional failures such as natural disasters that cause power outages. Additionally, to protect against host failure, automatic backups are created daily for the application as well as the infrastructure. DR and backups are implemented by DevOps teams with the following methods:

• Highly foolproof DR plans and backup strategies are created by conducting continuous audits of the infrastructure, the application, and the resources and also assessing the potential vulnerabilities. 
• The entire environment including the application data, systems, and database is replicated as a DR environment to reduce the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
• With DevOps data archival solutions, application-related data is replicated to a secondary region and can be retrieved quickly when needed. Scripts are checked into the code base for this purpose so that they can be referenced from the build process.
• Without affecting the existing resources, archived objects can be restored by leveraging the restore metadata either using a console or through a programmatical approach. 

5)Account Monitoring & Cost Optimization

Management of user accounts across the organization and monitoring resource utilization is essential to understanding where resources or instances are idle or overutilized. This helps allocate the right resources for the right DevOps pipeline implementation and helps develop strategies for cost-effectiveness:

• Implement identity management for access to resources forming a secure perimeter preventing misuse, idleness, or underutilization and bypassing the possibility of data breaches or inflated costs.
• Monthly reports are generated around the usage of resources to estimate cloud usage costs and create more cost-effective usage plans.
• There is the monitoring of usage and costs that help reports for billing analysis, as well as an understanding of unused or over-provisioned resources.
• In a single view, all the underutilized resources and instances are made available and opportunities for resource rightsizing, so that spending can be lowered, are then identified. Cloud utilization metrics are studied and recommendation algorithms suggest approaches to ensure cost optimization.

6)Cloud Native DevOps Automation

Cloud-native DevOps automation is being embraced by businesses in order to further accelerate time-to-market and develop high-quality applications quickly. The ways in which an organization can successfully implement DevOps automation in the cloud are the following:

• Various third-party tools can be leveraged to automate processes involved in software development through Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Steps such as server allocation and management, patching, and managing dependencies are automated so that businesses can focus solely on moving code into production.
• A source code audit, either manual or automated, compares the code with good code standards to find a violation of style guidelines, bugs, security susceptibilities, and boilerplate errors. 
• Change templates can be used for setting up configurations for automating repetitive and mundane tasks more easily.
• Containerized microservices can be deployed so that application development can become faster while enabling better scalability.
• The monitoring of infrastructure and application health can be done using log collection and analysis with third-party tools.

ALSO READ: Top 7 Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools to Automate Deployments

Leverage DevOps Managed Services for Quality Software Delivery

Moving data centers to the cloud and implementing DevOps Managed Services is a robust method to speed up collaboration between IT operations and development teams. Well-developed DevOps Managed Services expertise can ensure better IT systems management, remote monitoring and management of servers, network monitoring, and automation of other support services for better software quality and scalability. If you are on the lookout for such outcomes, you can book a free consultation with us today.