Overview

How much time does your IT department spend fighting fires? Transform your IT department into a true business asset by automating updates, installations, reporting, and more from one, centralized location. The goal of DevOps is to bring together an organization’s core IT Services including development, operations, security, and others and align them to the goals of the business, not their individual functional goals. DevOps enables the quick design, building testing and release of code into production environments.
 
We help customers tackle the challenge of integrating DevOps with other parts of the organization. Through the use of agile development combined with Azure DevOps and the features and capabilities of the Cloud we can help make your DevOps wheel spin faster. From Ideation and Planning to Development and Testing to Release and Operation and back again, we know the complete development-operations lifecycle. We are excellent at delivering DevOps because we have experience at the people, process, and technology sides to transform how an organization executes on IT for its business. We call this evolution of thought Modern Management, or rather a new way of thinking and dealing with operational lifecycle, development, and release management.
 
When it comes to managing your development pipeline, you need a tool to manage your work from planning to release. Azure DevOps is Microsoft's core platform for ALM/DevOps and all things in-between. 

More on DevOps

• ALM Framework

  The following ALM framework, used in DevOps conversations, focuses on the big four phases of operating any IT service.
  This framework represents the change occurring within IT to become more value driven for the business and faster at delivering.  This is sometimes called "Lean IT", where Lean principles are applied to IT functions. 
  
  The stages of the ALM lifecycle include Plan, Build Release and Operate.
  
  
  In the following graphic, notice how the ITIL framework factors into the ALM lifecycle and both frameworks match up, although many ITIL processes will see a reduction in manual effort and prominence as activities are automated.  The service management frameworks include Service Strategy, Service Design, Service Build, Service Transition, and Service Operations.
  
  
  You can also look at this from a Microsoft ecosystem, specifically cloud-centric. This framework includes Microsoft technologies, VSTS, Operations Management Suite (OMS), and Dynamics 365, as well as, a non-Microsoft technology, ServiceNow. 
  
  
  The technologies of Dynamics 365, OMS and VSTS enables the rate of movement as well as the confidence that is necessary to deliver on modern IT and increase the cadence of the entire circle of the IT lifecycle.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
   

• Core Tenants of Modern Management

  The following are the core tenants of Modern Management.
  • Defined: IT must define what it delivers to the business, why it is valuable, and what it costs, regardless of who deployed it or decided it was a good idea. 
  • ​Value: The applications we build or buy require a value-driven approach to managing the application lifecycle. 
  • Code: The transition that is occurring is that almost everything is "code" or a digital asset, whether it is infrastructure, configuration, or the application itself.  This state allows the asset to be version controlled, stored, validated, and secured. 
  • Cloud: The assumption for modern management is that IT is managing in a "cloud", which could be a public cloud, or an on-premise cloud.  A cloud may have servers, network devices, gateways, websites, etc. but they can always be "queried" from the cloud container.  This also includes SaaS based applications, which more and more can be "queried" vs. just tracked and managed.
  • Policies:  The Modern IT ecosystem will be one that continues to have policies, but those policies will declaratively implement a configuration state.  The Modern Management tooling is built to leverage a policy, to implement a control, necessary to protect the environment. 
  • Declarative: The biggest infrastructure difference in the Modern Management environment is that the configuration is declarative and idempotent.  A declarative configuration is one where you define as code an intended configuration and the configuration is then deployed to a target environment.  The state of indempotence is when that configuration is maintained and redeployed, regardless of manual changes made on the target system. 
  • Continuous: The most successful modern management is one that facilitates continuous deployment, meaning that the value is delivered to customers as soon as it is created. Enabling continuous deployment requires automation, declarative configuration, and continuous testing.  The automation of process activities, such as release management, allows for human activity to be removed from a process, allowing for a process to be streamlined.  The closer an organization gets to successful continuous deployment, the less errors exist within a process and the faster value can be provided.
  • Visible: The management of cloud-scale applications means that the way we "monitor" applications change.  The days of "sending alerts" to manually resolve errors are replaced with idempotent infrastructure, and continuous deployment.  These applications produce bugs and errors that need to be resolved and in order to understand them at cloud scale we need visibility.  Visibility lets us understand our system and build one which is self-maintaining in as "simple" of a manner as possible.  In a way, applications under modern management become less "intelligent" and more repeatable.
  • Feedback: The loop of error into our IT management space is as important as ever, but instead of more complicated we're going to make it more direct, faster, and more human-centric.  Modern IT is NOT automated IVRs, know-nothing help desks, and 6 month long requirements gathering sessions.  Feedback should be captured in appropriate channels, whether it is an incident or bug, and sent to the appropriate expert through as direct a channel as possible. The speed to execution is what Modern Management is all about, whether it is bugs, features, or incidents.
  • Requestable:  The management of an effective IT services makes it simple to understand and request to the stakeholder who is interested in it.  This has traditionally been provided through an IT service catalog, which continues to serve its purpose.  However, IT cannot assume it will always own the consumption layer and instead needs to build the necessary management into the operational process of each tool by gathering state vs. always controlling provisioning. In the end, IT services need to be both requestable and managed at the same time.