xOps confusion¶
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Critical Perspective on "xxxOps" frameworks and process improvement methodologies.
Various methodologies have emerged in the continually evolving landscape of business operations and process improvement, each promising to streamline operations and boost productivity. Among these is the 'xxxOps' group of methodologies, which includes DevOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, among others. However, these methodologies do not exist in isolation. They are rooted in older, established process improvement methodologies such as Business Process Management (BPM), Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Lean and more.For more:
DevOps, which stands for 'Development' and 'Operations', is a prime example. Originating from the need for improved collaboration between software developers and IT operations teams, DevOps employs Lean and Agile principles to eliminate waste, shorten system development cycles, and ensure customer-focused delivery. It embraces a multidisciplinary approach, encouraging cross-functional collaboration to speed up delivery while maintaining high quality.
Similarly, SecOps (Security Operations) and DataOps (Data Operations) borrow principles from traditional process improvement methodologies like TQM. They emphasise the importance of integrating and aligning all parts of an organisation towards a common goal, security and data management, respectively.
Notably,TQM is central in shaping these newer methodologies. TQM promotes continuous improvement in all aspects of an organisation, focusing on quality. Its commitment to cross-functional cooperation and employee engagement informs the 'xxxOps' methodologies, underlining the need for all employees, not just management, to participate in identifying and solving problems.
However, it's also worth noting that some 'xxxOps' methodologies have emerged as strategic marketing initiatives. Certain companies develop these methodologies with proprietary tools and platforms, presenting them as innovative solutions. While they often contain value, many are adaptations or combinations of existing methodologies, repackaged with new terminologies and structures. This addresses unique industry-specific challenges and offers a differentiation factor in a competitive market.
In conclusion, the route to effective process improvement doesn't lie in strict adherence to a single methodology, whether it's a traditional one or a modern 'xxxOps'. A flexible, open-minded approach that draws on principles and tools from various methodologies is likely to yield the best results.
Importantly, newer methodologies like DevOps and others have undoubtedly been instrumental in meeting the specific demands of today's data-driven world. Yet, it's crucial to recognise the foundational principles of established methodologies like TQM, Six Sigma, and Lean that these 'xxxOps' are built upon. Embracing a combined approach, adapting, and adopting practices that best suit an organisation's unique requirements is key.
Most of today's organisations fail to change fast and consistently, making the mistake of using multiple methodologies like SRE, DevOps, DevSecOps, Lean and Six Sigma simultaneously without clear alignment or boundaries, even in the same department.
After all, process improvement is about continuous learning, adapting, and improving - a philosophy that dates back to Lean, Six Sigma, BPM, and TQM, and one that we should carry forward as we navigate the digital age.
AgileOps¶
Agile operations, or AgileOps, is a digital business operating model that leverages Agile methodologies and DevOps techniques to enable organisations to adapt quickly and efficiently to change. It is an umbrella term centred on facilitating close collaboration between operations and developers with business leaders, data analysts, and the wider organisation.
The concept of AgileOps is based on continuous integration, evaluation, and delivery of services. It contrasts with the traditional waterfall model, which provides a sequential strategy for software development. AgileOps fosters teamwork and promotes a cultural change from earlier, more siloed strategies.
AgileOps helps organisations meet evolving business needs by enabling quick technology planning. In this environment, non-technical individuals increasingly collaborate with technical individuals, and IT workers are strategically positioned within an organisation1. Workflow management in AgileOps often follows a kanban style of communication, which helps identify bottlenecks and other issues. Continuous, incremental improvement is crucial for the success of AgileOps, emphasising process improvement and rapid adjustment to shifts in a specific business sector1.
At the core of AgileOps is a focus on effective communication. Organisations need strong communication paths, robust feedback mechanisms, well-written documentation, mature operational processes, secure and stable systems, and robust project management.
AIOps¶
xOps, or Operations - already went through a revolution known as DevOps - where changes and deployment became something that an application developer can do by using cloud services and orchestration software. AIOps is about bringing machine learning techniques to solve Ops problems such as reliability, monitoring, capacity management, service desks and even more automation than natively available through DevOps.
BizDevOps¶
BizOps, according to the BizOps Manifesto, is a declaration of values and principles aimed at better aligning and continually improving software development and operations to the needs of a digital business through a combination of technology, culture, and communication. The following values are fundamental to BizOps.
Prioritising business outcomes over individual projects and proxy metrics. Fostering trust and collaboration over individualism and hierarchy. Making data-driven decisions over opinions, judgments, and persuasion. Encouraging learning and pivoting over following a rigid plan. The key principles that guide BizOps include
Prioritising customers and satisfying investors and stakeholders through continuously discovering and delivering value-driven solutions. Aligning and measuring software and product investments against real business outcomes. Encouraging frequent changes to requirements based on changing market, customer, and business needs. Changes are welcome even after the software is in production, enabling the discovery of customer problems and solutions through experiments and testing of ideas. Business and technical teams must do more than work together; they must share a common vision and objectives to maximise the flow of value. Creating a culture that instils trust and confidence, enabling cultural agility by creating psychological safety to try new ideas. Building trust and respect through transparency, communication, meaningful measurement, and shared objectives. Utilising advanced analytics and AI/ML to aid decision-making in an environment where organisations generate more data than humans can process.
DataOps¶
DataOps is a collaborative data management practice focused on improving the communication, integration and automation of data flows between data managers and consumers across an organisation.
DevOps¶
The word “DevOps” was coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois, who became one of its gurus. There isn’t a definition or manifesto, or official framework for DevOps. It all started as a movement. There was some attempt from the community to create a manifesto, write principles and create a framework. However, until now, there isn’t anything widely accepted officially. My definition of DevOps is a set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production while ensuring high quality, integrity and repeatability.
DevSecOps¶
DevSecOps is the framework used by security practitioners, integrating security practices with DevOps processes. The DevSecOps community has its manifesto. Problems solving DevSecOps involves creating a ‘Security as Code’ practice for collaboration between software engineers and security engineers. That’s a response to the bottleneck effect of older security models on the modern continuous delivery pipeline. The goal is to bridge traditional software engineering and security gaps while ensuring fast, safe code delivery. Silos are replaced by collaboration and shared responsibility for security checks during all phases of the delivery process. DevSecOps are also
Benefits of using In highly regulated environments and in environments with high-security risks, the practices of DevSecOps will mitigate the risks of security threats in production environments without
Reducing the velocity of the application and service development. Reducing remediation costo.
DevTestOps¶
DevTestOps, or Development Test Operations, is a software development methodology that integrates development, testing and operations into a unified process. It represents an evolution of the DevOps methodology, further bridging the gap between developers and operations by incorporating testing as a core element throughout the entire software development lifecycle.
In a DevTestOps model, testing is not an isolated phase carried out after development but rather a continuous process that occurs alongside development. The goal is to identify and resolve any issues as early as possible, reducing the time, cost, and risk associated with software defects.
This approach emphasises the importance of collaboration and communication between all teams involved in the software development process. It recognises that quality cannot be 'added' to a product; rather, it must be embedded from the outset, with everyone taking a share of responsibility.
FinOps¶
FinOps is an evolving discipline and cultural practice in cloud financial management that aims to maximise business value. It facilitates collaboration among engineering, finance, technology, and business teams on data-driven spending decisions. FinOps is fundamentally about managing cloud costs so that every team member takes ownership of their cloud usage, supported by a central group that provides best practices. These cross-functional teams work together to accelerate product delivery while achieving more financial control and predictability.
The term "FinOps" is a portmanteau of "Finance" and "DevOps", which emphasises the communication and collaboration between business and engineering teams. It's also known by other names such as "Cloud Financial Management", "Cloud Financial Engineering", "Cloud Cost Management", "Cloud Optimization", or "Cloud Financial Optimization".
Importantly, FinOps is about bringing a financial accountability cultural change to the variable spend model of the cloud. It allows distributed engineering and business teams to make informed trade-offs between speed, cost, and quality in their cloud architecture and investment decisions. While it may seem that FinOps is about saving money, it's actually about making money. Cloud spending can drive more revenue, indicating customer base growth, increase the velocity of product and feature releases, or even assist in shutting down a data centre. FinOps focuses on removing obstacles, empowering engineering teams to deliver better features, applications, and migrations faster, and facilitating cross-functional discussions about where and when to invest.
GitOps¶
Software-defined operations, GitOps is the logical extension of DevOps. At Its core, the goal is to release applications efficiently and securely.
From Weave.Works deemed to have coined the term GitOps For more:
MLOps¶
MLOps is the process of taking an ML solution and bringing it to production. It needs a culture and tools that connect concerns in ML systems development with concerns in ML systems operations. This touches on a number of themes such as CI/CD, data reliability, monitoring, scaling, decoupling, and fast deployment to production, avoiding fragile systems. It is the communication between data scientists and operations teams. MLOps have a mix of capabilities of Data scientists and services designed to provide automation in ML pipelines and get more precious insights into production systems. It provides reproducibility, visibility managed access control, and the computing resources to test, train, and deploy AI algorithms to Data engineers, business analysts, and operations teams.
NoOps¶
NoOps, short for "No Operations", is a concept in software development and IT operations that suggests an environment where the provisioning and management of infrastructure are so automated and abstracted from the underlying platforms that there is no need for a dedicated team to manage software in-house. That is the promise of serverless computing.
NoOps aims to automate and abstract processes to the point where a team is not necessary to manage things like servers, storage, and networking. Instead, the vendor can manage these elements, allowing the in-house developers to focus on writing and delivering code.
NoOps can be seen as the next evolution beyond DevOps, a model where developers and operations staff collaborate closely on software delivery. In a NoOps model, the focus shifts towards automating infrastructure management tasks to the maximum extent, so developers can concentrate on coding and improving product features.
It's important to note that while NoOps aims for a completely automated IT environment, this doesn't mean that operations roles disappear entirely. Rather, the nature of these roles changes, moving from routine tasks towards more strategic responsibilities that focus on business needs, process optimisation, and governance. This includes areas like monitoring, incident management, and capacity planning, which still require human oversight, even in highly automated environments.
ScriptOps¶
ScriptOps is an old infamous approach of creating your own tools to automate all of your tasks. In theory, that is not wrong. However, that means that you have the right team in place.
SecOps¶
SecOps, short for Security Operations, is a methodology in Information Technology that focuses on integrating and aligning the efforts of security and operations teams. SecOps aims to foster collaboration between these traditionally siloed departments, ensuring that security considerations are integrated from the earliest stages of system and application development and continue to be a focus throughout the life cycle of a product.
In a SecOps model, security measures are no longer seen as a separate layer or a final hurdle before deployment but rather are woven into the fabric of day-to-day operations. This approach seeks to reduce vulnerabilities and improve response times to any potential threats, ultimately leading to a safer and more secure IT infrastructure.
Key activities in SecOps may include continuous monitoring and analysis of system data for potential security threats, development and enforcement of security policies, incident response planning, and regular communication and collaboration between security and operations teams.
SRE¶
SRE is a term for Site Reliability Engineering, a Job role and a discipline that incorporates aspects of software engineering and DevOps and applies them to infrastructure and operations problems. The main goals are to create scalable and highly reliable software systems. First mentioned and defined by Google engineers, a few books are available to support the role. For more:
TestOps¶
TestOps, short for Test Operations, is a concept that merges testing and operations similarly to DevOps. This approach seeks to bring quality assurance (QA) and testing into the fold of the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, promoting collaboration between testing and development teams and ensuring product quality throughout the development lifecycle.
TestOps aims to automate as much of the testing process as possible and integrate this automation into the overall development and deployment workflow. This approach aids in identifying and rectifying issues early in the development process, thus reducing overall software development time and costs.
Furthermore, TestOps encourages the continuous monitoring of application performance in production environments to detect potential problems proactively. This ties in with the modern software principle of "shift-right" testing, where testing continues even after software deployment.
TestOps necessitates a cultural change within the organisation, promoting a shared responsibility for quality assurance among all team members, rather than being the testers' sole concern. The overall result is a more efficient, agile, and high-quality software development process.
ToolsOps¶
ToolsOps is an infamous concept related to driving operations with tools and orchestrating the tools with other tools. You need the right tool to do the job.