Software development and operation teams oftentimes don’t collaborate in an ideal way. In a lot of cases, development teams fall short in providing operations teams the information they need to do their work.
Practical difficulty can be a great cause of this: developers understandably don’t feel like doing a bunch of bothersome, manual work. This disconnection can produce a siloed culture in your company, with development teams working autonomously, and operations teams having to troublesomely figure out what happened on the other side.
DevOps as a Service gives you a way of creating a cooperative connection between your development and operations teams. Through the comfort of the ServiceNow platform, operations and compliance teams can effortlessly find whatever they seek, without intruding on the autonomy of development teams.
In this article, we’ll explore the various advantages DevOps as a Service on ServiceNow can have for your company:
The people working on an operations team can quickly get frustrated if they have a lack of oversight on a development team. They have no idea what software or application was developed, when it was deployed, and which impact a deployment had. The same goes for compliance teams who come in to do their audit at the end of the year. Because of insufficient recordkeeping, they have to painstakingly collect information about things that happened months ago.
Development teams, on the other hand, can quickly get bored by all the manual work they have to do. Before deploying their work for testing, they have to plan a meeting to run tests, log onto a separate system to register what they have done, and so on. These things distract them from what they love doing most, and what they’ve been hired to do: code.
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Instead of having an IT environment with a scattered set of CI/CD tools, ServiceNow’s DevOps application allows you to integrate any major tool (e.g. Azure DevOps, GitLab, Jenkins) to its platform. Moreover, DevOps as a Service largely eliminates manual work, as every change a development team makes, is automatically tracked. Operations teams can now easily find which lines of code have been committed, who initiated and authorized a deployment, and much more, without having to approach developers for information.
The benefits of a well-organized DevOps culture are not just confined to development and operations teams. Here are three further advantages DevOps as a Service can bring to your company:
Organizations often have trouble overseeing the hundreds of teams that work under them. Each team uses a different tool, and has their own unique way of working. The beauty of the DevOps application on ServiceNow is that the platform can integrate cloud tools, on-premise tools, or a combination of both. This way, organizations can have easy oversight of a diverse set of data through the same entry point, and the teams can keep using the tools they like most.
ServiceNow is therefore a way to kill two birds with one stone: keep developers happy by letting them work the way they want, and make IT change managers’ supervisory job significantly less complicated.
Oftentimes, an operations team has no idea why an outage happened, or where it happened. This stretches out MTTR, and causes a lot of unnecessary downtime.
DevOps as a Service can reduce, or even prevent downtime caused by IT problems. Operations teams can easily see if a test in the CI/CD pipeline has shown that something shouldn’t be deployed, and ServiceNow can give them a heads-up about what the impact of a change is. Checks are done automatically before deployment, drastically reducing lead-time from weeks to minutes.
Using DevOps as a Service can make your company proactive instead of reactive. Rather than waiting for a breakdown to happen, you can create an IT environment that’s constantly being maintained.
Compliance teams often have trouble collecting information from development and operations teams when they do their yearly audit. Information about changes that happened a long time ago has to be tracked down, which is self-evidently difficult.
With DevOps as a Service, compliance teams can simply see all changes in ServiceNow. They don’t have to go into individual CI/CD tools to check what happened the previous months, and don’t have to spend time gathering info from individual teams. Using ServiceNow lessens the work compliance teams have to do, and improves the results of financial audits, thereby creating more transparency in your company.
In this blog, our IRM expert Carel explains the benefits of ServiceNow IRM and DevOps by telling the success story of one of our customers.
Use our Enterprise DevOps Reference Poster to learn how to combine DevOps and ServiceNow within large enterprises.
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