DEVOPS

We automatically ask ourselves several questions when putting dev and ops in one team:
  • To make the most of DevOps, you will have to upgrade at least part of your infrastructure to optimize software delivery. Most apps running on virtual servers will need be adapted to run on containers. Are you ready for this? How will this impact your operations? Do you start with a new team for DevOps? What about your classical operations?
  • What about delivery of secure code? Who is responsible for security testing? Oh, sorry I forgot, this is just another discipline called DevSecOps. DevSecOps — short for development, security, and operations—automates the integration of security at every phase of the software development lifecycle, from initial design through integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery.
  • What about the delivery of multiple software’s or products to operations, does everybody does his own thing? One tool for all or multiple teams that use their own tools. How do you streamline multiple dev teams with one ops team, or do you create an ops team per dev team?
  • What about trivial functions like management of all product components like data, software images, libraries, docker images … is this done per dev team?
  • Who is responsible for the choice of tools and products? Is this the task of dev? Ops?
To me this seems a lot of responsibilities and tasks to drive from development to operations. I understand the need for the cooperation but would create a platform that developers can use to deliver their products and that takes care of the operational tasks. This then is called PlatformOps, as operations delivers a platform to development that eases the cooperation between both.

PLATFORMOPS

PlatformOps has grown out of the popularity of DevOps. It aims to streamline processes involved in scaling a DevOps practice. It allows developers to focus on development and companies to focus on their customers, rather than their operations processes.

The role of a PlatformOps team is to provide operational services to development teams so that they can use these services. These services include monitoring, dashboarding, infrastructure creation, CI/CD pipeline creation, setup of new projects, security services and testing.

The essence of PlatformOps is turning DevOps capabilities into products and services. This means separating the core business from the platform that supports the development of the core business. It allows integrating best practices, and it provides consistency and empowerment that makes DevOps culture possible in large enterprise organizations.

platformops

The PlatformOps team is responsible for the creation and management of the following items:

  • Value stream delivery and CI/CD
  • Infrastructure automation
  • Artifact repository
  • Monitoring/AIOps
  • Alerting and emergency response
  • Cloud costs and infrastructure optimization
  • Infrastructure and application security
  • Secret management
  • Metrics
In an ideal world, there would be one integrated PlatformOps software platform. As this is difficult to realize, PlatformOps tends to use a few tools that can work together. In this respect Open-Source tools offer a good starting point. But, this requires integration to create a good functioning platform.

OPS TRANSFORMATION TO PLATFORMOPS

The difficulty of PlatformOps is the transformation of the operations team and the interaction with the development team. Traditionally, operations work with the second and third line using the servicedesk as a communication tool. Now they are confronted with developers and new ways of working. This is not only a technical challenge, but also an organizational challenge.

SERVICE INTEGRATORS PLATFORMOPS

Managing azure applications and resources is part of our OpsNow PlatformOps service. These services provide Managed Services for your cloud resources and applications in the cloud. PlatformOps is enabled for customers that want to use applications and microservices in the Azure cloud. We manage not only the traditional environments, but provide you an environment for your applications, where we interact with the development teams to provide fast deploys and operational excellence in the cloud or on-site.