DevOps Made Easy

As a guiding framework, DevOps allows development, quality assurance, and operations to work as a single team, with a single focus: responding to emerging business and customer needs with speed and coordination. This integrated, team-oriented approach facilitates communication, collaboration, and integration, making it easier to manage today’s rapidly changing demands.

Every organization will implement DevOps principles in a unique way across their development, operations, and business teams. Some may look to DevOps to as an exploratory, non-linear process that emphasizes agility and speed. Others, meanwhile, will view it as more traditional and sequential, with a focus on delivering releases with high levels of quality, stability, safety, and accuracy.

Regardless of how DevOps is utilized, clients routinely tell us they’re adopting the practice in order to achieve a few key goals:

• Expedite application changes by leveraging modern tools and features
• Automate build, deployment, and testing processes with modern frameworks and tools
  
• Quickly gather feedback and use it to improve the user experience
  
• Limit errors with automated test tooling that catches bugs sooner
  
• Stabilize feature introductions by creating a standardized software delivery process

Taking these – and other – goals into consideration, we’ve developed an approach to DevOps in the ClearPath Forward® environment that focuses on four key process areas:

• Change & Configuration Management (CCM): Addresses application lifecycle management (ALM), with emphasis on version control, continuous integration, build repositories, automated deployments, and change management.
  
• Testing Lifecycle Management (TLM): Automates unit, code, security, functional, load, and regression testing, and includes test data management processes.
  
• Technical Release Management (TRM): Establishes a framework for coordinating development and operations teams, managing capacity, updating release management tools, and scheduling releases.
  
• Environment Management (EM): Schedules and provisions releases, with a focus on incident and configuration management, application monitoring, and log management.

Bringing DevOps to Life

With an approach grounded in these four key process areas, you can establish a uniform DevOps experience for all environments.

To help you get there, we’ve developed three distinct services designed to ready your organization for DevOps, foster the growth and understanding of its principles across your organization, and make the process run as efficiently and effectively as possible:

• DevOps Strategic Consulting: We’ll assess the as-is state of your organization, along with your existing DevOps readiness and maturity levels, the tools you’re already utilizing, and the current culture around DevOps. With this assessment as a guide, we’ll help you identify gaps, build initiatives that foster greater efficiency and automation, and establish an adoption roadmap that considers your desired business outcomes.
  
• DevOps Implementation Consulting: You’ll have access to resources that provide active guidance to teams and stakeholders alike as you work through the process of preparing and launching your transformation programs. This includes the on-the-job coaching you’ll need to deliver successful outcomes throughout every step of the DevOps journey.
  
• DevOps Technology Consulting Services: You’ll have the support you need to identify and implement customized tools and processes that will help drive your DevOps journey over both the short and long terms. In addition, you’ll have the option to use a managed services solution that supports your DevOps needs, while offloading much of the day-to-day functions to Unisys.
  

While these services provide a general framework and approach to helping drive DevOps adoption, they will be customized and specialized to match the unique requirements of the ClearPath Forward environment.

Regardless of where we land, our approach to DevOps will help you build a roadmap that delivers quick results and makes it easy to prove the value this practice holds for IT and the business alike.

We’d love to support your organization as it embarks on its DevOps journey. To learn more about our DevOps capabilities, and the value they can bring to your organization, please contact your Unisys sales representative.