DevOps Customer Success - How to increase service availability, accelerate innovation, and improve pipeline performance

By industrializing software delivery, DevOps has the potential to transform IT in the same way that Henry Ford transformed manufacturing

Back in 1913, Henry Ford started a manufacturing revolution. On December 1, the first automotive assembly line heralded the advent of mass production and reduced the time required to build a Model T to only 2 ½ hours. That allowed Ford to slash manufacturing costs as well as the price of his iconic automobile. By 1924, 10 million Model Ts had rolled off the assembly line, and the rest is history. 

Nowadays, DevOps has the potential to transform IT in the same way that Ford’s moving assembly line revolutionized manufacturing. It industrializes the software development process, using its own automated assembly line — the CI/CD pipeline – to reliably deliver software at an unprecedented pace. In some organizations, that means a new software release every few hours—and sometimes even faster. By treating DevOps customer success as a unified whole rather than silos, DevOps improves service reliability, reduces performance risk, and drives continuous improvement.

At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. 

DevOps is still struggling to break down development silos, and pipeline performance is suffering.

Why? Because that automated CI/CD pipeline is built using half a dozen or more point tools. Yes, they all work together, but there’s no automated, end-to-end visibility. Information about each stage in the pipeline is locked away in individual tools. Imagine having an assembly line where you can’t easily figure out how long it takes to build a car, let alone monitor manufacturing quality and performance. That’s exactly the situation many DevOps teams face. 

There’s an even bigger visibility gap between development and operations. The victims? Service availability and innovation.

It’s not just about the CI/CD pipeline. How do you break down barriers between development and operations when your operations platform doesn’t talk to your development tools? It’s a huge challenge. When there’s an outage, you have to rummage through your development tools to figure out which software components just changed – and who changed them. We’ve been trying to get rid of this type of swivel-chair management for years. But it persists. 

And the problem runs both ways. You can’t manage risk and drive continuous improvement in your CI/CD pipeline unless you understand the operational outcomes. For instance, which components are causing the most operational issues? Do you need to improve test coverage – or tighten controls on an inexperienced development team? Unless you can quickly connect the dots between development and operations, you have no choice but to slow everything down. As a result, innovation suffers.

ServiceNow creates a unified view across development and operations, helping DevOps to improve pipeline performance, increase service availability, and accelerate innovation. 

So, how do you break down these barriers within the CI/CD pipeline and more broadly across your development and production environments? Even if you had a single DevOps platform, that would still leave the development/operations divide. And to be clear, many DevOps organizations don’t want a single DevOps platform; they want the freedom to choose their own best-of-breed development tools.

There is a solution. ServiceNow already provides a real-time, end-to-end view across operational environments — including the cloud-native environments where DevOps thrives. What if you could extend this visibility to the CI/CD pipeline, creating a unified view of the entire software lifecycle? 

You can.

ServiceNow® DevOps integrates with your existing CI/CD tools, creating end-to-end visibility and making your pipeline measurable and manageable. And, by combining ServiceNow DevOps with ServiceNow® IT Operations Management and IT Service Management, you create a unified view across your development and production environments. This gives you the real-time insights you need to revert sooner, remediate faster, reduce performance risk, and continuously optimize your pipeline. That’s the power of the Now Platform®. 

To find out more about how ServiceNow can help you to improve pipeline performance, increase service availability, and accelerate innovation, click here to download the latest Insights Paper, “Why ServiceNow is critical for DevOps success.”

https://www.servicenow.com/lpwhp/devops-performance-avail-innovation.html

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