DevOps
Innovate faster and with greater agility with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD)
Accelerating application development
DevOps is a combination of techniques and business practices designed to drive superior collaboration and integration between developer and operations/IT teams. It enables a new methodology for application development, allowing organizations to continuously develop, deliver, and integrate incremental updates rather than slow, periodic releases that can require service downtime.
Maintaining applications through their lifecycle can be a manual, time-consuming process. Further, special consideration must be given to ensure successful deployments, else organizations can face unexpected downtime, extended development cycles, or worse, unhappy customers.
Offered as a managed service, the DevOps practice at Neal Analytics supports organizations by leveraging a custom-tailored version of the same methodology that is used in-house to drive dozens of successful application development projects. This proven model leverages our in-house process to deliver the 3 key benefits of DevOps:
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- Improved quality: Standardize tools and processes, implement quality control, and reduce fire drills
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- Reduced effort: Fewer manual processes via automation, reduce maintenance requirements, and leverage reusable configuration templates
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- Increased collaboration: Structure, improved communication channels, and clear direction and prioritization encourage frequent team collaboration
Benefits
Improved app quality
Reduced development effort
Increased team collaboration
Improved application quality
A key challenge facing development teams is how to develop consistent, high-quality applications, updates, and innovations every time.
To help create consistency and improve application quality, Neal Analytics works with customers to understand their ongoing projects, needs, and the challenges they’re trying to solve with DevOps. By understanding this, Neal can help implement a DevOps methodology that drives improved quality via:
- Standardization of tools and processes to create consistency across projects and releases
- Quality control processes including source control branching, code reviews, environment management, and more
- Best practices designed to reduce fire drills and break-fix measures
Reduced effort
A core tenant of DevOps, and especially Neal’s methodology, is reducing unnecessary effort.
Reducing effort is built into the methodology and most organizations will see a reduction in effort as a byproduct of using the standardized tools and processes discussed above. To help further reduce the effort developers need to put into application development, the Neal DevOps methodology leverages:
- Automation to reduce manual processes and interventions
- Governance and management processes to streamline maintenance
- Configuration templates for common builds/configurations
Increased collaboration
DevOps is more than a set of tools or a checklist to be run through prior to releasing a new application or update. It is also intended to affect change on team or company culture, to include inspiring inter-team collaboration.
Neal Analytics helps support collaboration by ensuring DevOps implementations use an agile structure and philosophy to:
- Encourage frequent collaboration between teams and team members
- Provide improved communication channels to identify, track, and manage risks
- Ensure teams receive clear direction and prioritization through stakeholder, developer, and end user collaboration
Popular DevOps tools
Neal leverages several DevOps tools in development projects. The tools listed below are among those most commonly used in DevOps engagements at Neal.
Azure DevOps provides teams with a simple platform for managing tasks, test plans, artifacts, boards, pipelines, and integrated repository hosting. Neal’s expertise in this tool’s use, integrated process, and leveraging an integrated project management dashboard allows Neal’s DevOps teams to simplify project management, leading to more rapid success.
GitHub is a valuable tool to collaborate on and deliver code more quickly. DevOps projects at Neal often leverage GitHub as a source control & process expertise tool, which enables DevOps engineers to more effectively manage code branches, resulting in quicker sprints with higher quality results. Neal can also help organizations leverage GitHub to drive superior project management or can help implement and customize Microsoft’s many GitHub-based accelerators.
Example engagements with Neal Analytics
Application architecture review
Organizations seeking to rearchitect cloud apps to enable DevOps can take advantage of Neal Analytics’ expertise with DevOps and application modernization to review app architectures and provide guidance on how to best refactor them.
Providing expertise into DevOps best practices, Neal Analytics can provide support ranging from consulting advisory services where a Neal DevOps practitioner works with the customer to oversee and provide feedback on current practices, to full scale managed services where a Neal Analytics DevOps team consisting of practitioners, consultants, and developers manage the architecture of applications for the customer.
Development optimization
Get help reducing costs, enabling greater development team throughput, and improving project tracking with help from Neal Analytics.
DevOps experts from Neal Analytics can help organizations manage costs, keep projects on track, and enable faster time to production for DevOps projects through the implementation of tools designed to provide granular visibility into DevOps projects including project progress, milestone progression, and developer hours spent on the project. Development optimization engagements also typically include consulting support to identify gaps in best practices and provide feedback on process improvements in coordination with the implementation of the new tools described above.
DevOps implementation
Organizations seeking to implement DevOps, or scale-out their existing DevOps practice, can leverage DevOps consultants to help expedite the process.
Neal can help implement or manage growing DevOps practices by defining DevOps processes, standards, and best practices. During DevOps consulting engagements, Neal experts work hand-in-hand with the customer to learn about the unique aspects of the customer’s culture, desired business outcomes, and goals. Neal experts then provide feedback on DevOps processes and standards tailored to the desired business outcomes based on these learnings.
Getting started
Neal Analytics has experience implementing DevOps for organizations across virtually all industries.
As a consulting firm that has to drive projects concurrently, Neal has experienced these challenges first-hand. To address them, the Neal Analytics team has long used DevOps to govern projects. Now, the same DevOps methodology used in-house is available for Neal’s customers.
From this experience, the DevOps experts at Neal Analytics know there isn’t a one-size-fits-all DevOps methodology or toolset, necessitating fine-tuning and custom-tailoring. As such, any DevOps engagement will start with Neal’s team of business consultants and DevOps engineers working with the client’s IT and developer team to understand their unique needs and challenges.
From there, engagements follow the customer’s unique requirements but often shift into a proof of concept phase or the road mapping phase for organization-wide DevOps implementation.
Ready to begin leveraging DevOps in your organization? Contact us to get started.
Interested in DevOps but not ready to make a total commitment? Neal Analytics offers flexible engagement models designed to support organizations however they need, including creating exploratory proof of concepts.
