DevOps: Breaking the Development-Operations barrier
DevOps gave us an edge
“DevOps has helped us do very frequent releases, giving us an edge on time to market. We are now able to make daily product releases as opposed to 6-month releases, and push fixes to our customers in a span of a few hours.”
— Hamesh Chawla, VP of Engineering at Zephyr
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably. The concept of DevOps is founded on building a culture of collaboration between teams that historically functioned in relative siloes. The promised benefits include increased trust, faster software releases, ability to solve critical issues quickly, and better manage unplanned work.
At Atlassian, DevOps is the next most famous portmanteau (combining of two words) next to Brangelina (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie), bringing together the best of software development and IT operations. And like our jokes, it requires some explaining.
At its essence, DevOps is a culture, a movement, a philosophy.
It's a firm handshake between development and operations that emphasizes a shift in mindset, better collaboration, and tighter integration. It unites agile, continuous delivery, automation, and much more, to help development and operations teams be more efficient, innovate faster, and deliver higher value to businesses and customers.
Who's doing DevOps?
Chef is the company behind the Chef Automate platform for DevOps workflows. Tens of thousands of developers use Chef to test, automate, and manage infrastructure. At the forefront of the DevOps evolution, the Seattle-based company has been releasing products like Chef, InSpec, Habitat, and Chef Automate to advance new ways of developing and shipping software and applications. To experiment with and refine its own DevOps practices, Chef relies on the Atlassian platform.
Challenge
At the forefront of the DevOps evolution, the Seattle-based company has been releasing products like Chef, InSpec, Habitat, and Chef Automate to advance new ways of developing and shipping software and applications. To experiment with and refine its own DevOps practices, Chef relies on the Atlassian platform.
At the forefront of the DevOps evolution, the Seattle-based company has been releasing products like Chef, InSpec, Habitat, and Chef Automate to advance new ways of developing and shipping software and applications. To experiment with and refine its own DevOps practices, Chef relies on the Atlassian platform.
Solution
Chef first adopted Jira Software for bug tracking. As the company matured both its agile and DevOps practices, its use of Atlassian evolved from a helpdesk and ticketing system to a more holistic product development solution. Using Atlassian helps Chef ensure business value is attached to each opportunity so teams understand what they should prioritize. Says Julian Dunn, product manager at Chef, "Jira helped us think beyond agile to develop our DevOps approach."
Chef first adopted Jira Software for bug tracking. As the company matured both its agile and DevOps practices, its use of Atlassian evolved from a helpdesk and ticketing system to a more holistic product development solution. Using Atlassian helps Chef ensure business value is attached to each opportunity so teams understand what they should prioritize. Says Julian Dunn, product manager at Chef, "Jira helped us think beyond agile to develop our DevOps approach."
“DevOps has evolved so that development owns more operations – and that’s how Chef works,” adds Dunn. Chef itself doesn’t have a QA team anymore. “We can’t just throw it over the wall anymore. Our engineers are responsible for QA, writing, and running their own tests to get the software out to customers.”
Currently, 5-6 engineering teams are using Jira Software for lightweight agile processes. Before, Chef had multiple Jira instances with heavily customized boards and workflows that became difficult to manage. Now teams use defaults as much as possible to keep their pipelines clear and avoid giant backlogs. Also, with Jira, they can focus more on customer value while balancing operational needs. “Atlassian gives us end-to-end visibility so we can keep releasing the best products to our customers," says Dunn.
Chef uses Atlassian’s wider set of tools as well. The company integrates Jira with Confluence as the process and procedure knowledge base for engineers, and as a replacement for an archive of Google documents that lacked content hierarchy. IT teams use Jira Service Desk for internal support, such as resolving hardware issues. Says Dunn,“Atlassian is the only company that can get Dev and Ops on the same platform.”
Business teams like marketing also use Trello to track to-do lists, quarterly plans, and other short-term projects. Legal uses Trello to manage any work in flight such as contracts, and HR hosts its employee handbook in Trello. “Trello is easy for any team to get started on a workflow quickly,” explains Dunn.
Benefits
From marketing, legal, engineering, operations and IT, Atlassian improves visibility and collaboration across teams and workflows at Chef. As Chef advances its own DevOps practices, customers embracing Chef products are advancing their practices as well.
From marketing, legal, engineering, operations and IT, Atlassian improves visibility and collaboration across teams and workflows at Chef. As Chef advances its own DevOps practices, customers embracing Chef products are advancing their practices as well.
