How IT Services companies are approaching DevOps?

DevOps is a disruption that will have a sweeping impact on software development practices. The advent of the application economy has changed the demand landscape completely as IT organizations are forced to relook at their IT infrastructure to the new normal demands.

As we take the supply side of things, today all IT services companies are inking bold new strategies to take on to the new normal tech challenges. The old school global delivery models based on ‘Time and Material (T&M)’ approaches no longer holds good and 'Outcome" based model is the client preferred delivery approach now. So when we speak about an outcome based model, clearly, it is an approach that is measurable with many parameters and metrics and hence tighter SLAs.

In this backdrop, while Cloud in the last few years have unbundled some of the ‘On Prem’ challenges at the same time has created the need for elastic IT infrastructures- that is agile and be able to pro-actively address demands.

Clearly IT services companies today need to have a multi-pronged delivery strategy. Many are resorting to 'Automation and AI', but at the heart of it, the need to put in place agile development practices to create elastic and on demand IT infrastructure. It is in this context DevOps is expected to play a pivotal role as we move forward.

Lets look at some of the services companies and how they are approaching DevOps.

The Supply Side

Says Prashant Vasant Burse- AVP – Senior Delivery Manager, Infosys, “Given the growing demand to implement DevOps capabilities in our projects and our client organizations, Infosys has built strong capabilities in this space and our client engagements on DevOps are increasing at a rapid pace. Our solution is based on 3 levers:

• Leveraging people with the right skills to increase collaboration between development, QA and operations.
• Having well-defined, lean processes and practices for measurable and predictable outcomes.
• Using technology to maximize automation and increase adoption of right tools.

The key here is the seamless amalgamation of people, process and technologies. Says Abhay Pendse, Associate Vice President, Corporate CTO Leadership Team at Persistent Systems, “ Persistent Systems has a holistic approach in adopting and implementing DevOps for all projects within the organization as part of our larger strategic technology innovation initiative of Software 4.0. Here continuous engineering is a key component of Software 4.0.”

Pendse give a deep dive on his company's approach. He agrees with Burse that People, process, and technology are the three pillars of DevOps and he gives his perspective on these three key elements in DevOps:

People: As part of building strong DevOps capabilities on the people front, we have rolled out a series of DevOps online training modules, starting with the basic principles and moving on to advanced topics and specific tools. These trainings have seen great response, and a large number of employees have undergone the training. This has helped Persistent to build the right DevOps capabilities within organization.

Process: On the process front, Persistent was already following the agile methodology (specifically the Scaled Agile Framework, or SAFe), which provides a capable vehicle for DevOps implementation within projects. Persistent project teams have been focusing on implementing the core principles of DevOps within projects and have made great strides in achieving end to end automation (from unit test cases, to build automation, to test automation and eventually deployment automation).

Technology: On the technology front, Persistent continues to use DevOps tooling appropriate for the client’s environment – including IBM, Microsoft, open-source, and hybrid stacks.

Lets look at how Mindtree is approaching DevOps. Manoj Karanth, GM, Digital Business, Mindtree quips, “ Mindtree’s vision for digital application delivery is driven by its stated mission of “Shrink time & effort in delivering best-in-class digital solutions by evangelizing agile methodology, industrializing DevOps platform through new-age Tools and technology Frameworks”.

Karanth further says that it is is based on the premise of having self-contained, flexible, lean, full stack engineering teams who are closely aligned, trained and enabled towards faster delivery of digital solution. We consider DevOps to be an enabler, powered by automation, to achieve the productivity and quality goals, measured by KPIs. The tenets of this industrialized agile development is backed by a platform which we call CAPE. This is Meta Platform to Compose, Provision, Operate and Visualize software deliveries and environments. This includes platforms for assessing agile maturity in an organization, automated continuous integration pipelines, environment as a service though pre-defined template libraries, dynamic test engineering and automation integrated through an intelligence and insights dashboard.

“Distilling our experiences, we have been able to zero-in on the key metrics to be measured for DevOps engagements which is delivered through our insights dashboard. All the metrics are directly measured through the DevOps tools with no human approximations. When coupled with our DevOps maturity framework it provides a clear path for organization’s adoption towards DevOps maturity. This has allowed us to offer models like “DevOps as Service” to our customers in a 24x7, KPI based model,” adds Karanth.

Finally we asked Madhavan Krishnan, Vice President Cloud Solutions, VirtusaPolaris Corporation about this. He says, “ DevOps has become mainstream in VirtusaPolaris. We have adopted DevOps tooling and methodologies for executing vast percentage of our projects. We have our own set of in-house tools that take care of life-cycle DevOps tooling that enables Agile delivery We have tools that take care of the evaluating code quality, environment management, automated build process and a test automation tool framework which is called ‘ERA Insight’ that takes care of the entire test automation process. This tooling plays a very important part in meeting the DevOps business objectives.”

“At VirtusaPolaris, we also look at DevOps an integrated infrastructure plus application lifecycle management point of view. So, our solutions of DevOps stands across the entire solution stack, starting from infrastructure layering to database to application and to the process layers of the application that we design and develop. We are increasingly adopting DevOps for most of our digital projects as they are enabled through tools that are available to be consumed on cloud, coupled with our own tools of DevOps that we have built over the years. We are also increasingly adopting DevOps in new areas like IoT. We have a very comprehensive approach to DevOps and are constantly in the process of enhancing our own tool kit and build intellectual property in this space,” adds Madhavan.

The above insights from some of the leading services companies’ gives a sense about the growing escalation of DevOps and how they are gearing up by upping the ante on DevOps. Do you have a DevOps story to share? What is your view and DevOps and how do you see this disruption. Let’s hear your views.