Culture is more important than competence in IT Outsourcing. According to Tech Giants, the market for IT outsourcing in North America is now established enough for clients to concentrate on offshore developers rather than the budget. Leading outsourcing providers like BJIT offer a variety of IT infrastructure services, including management consulting to integrate various business and technological services, application configuration, development, maintenance, and integration with other services.

According to META, outsourcing solutions are transitioning to integrated business and technology solutions. Competitive differentiation now focuses on vertical expertise, cultural alignment, and the capacity to be competitive across the full spectrum of technology solutions, as well as the integration of management consulting and business expertise.

Let us discover how infrastructure teams may begin to participate in DevOps activities within their businesses.

Enablers for IT infrastructure 

A DevOps framework is appropriate for enterprises that require a large number of app releases, new feature installations, and application upgrades in a short period of time.

To ensure system stability and scalability, organizations frequently use complicated, multi-tiered systems, risking delays in the release of their goods and services. These problems may be solved using the DevOps methodology. Organizations must first assess and prove that the framework is necessary to execute by deciding on the required frequency of application builds or releases each week.

Even if the teams for development, testing, and IT operations collaborate to embrace DevOps, the effort needed from an IT infrastructure outsourcing and operations perspective is significant and occasionally underestimated. Stakeholders from the application development and testing teams are expected to participate in a three-stage process to implement a DevOps-based environment.

The Agile infrastructure

The DevOps implementation will simplify the current support structure inside operations by automating environment build and application release management tasks.

Let us see how BJIT has embraced the DevOps Framework to win against all the odds:

• Iterative software development and testing is a key component of the Agile software development process. This necessitates the deployment of codes often and the quick assessment of outcomes.

• Continuous integration (CI) software must be used, in order to move to the Agile manifesto in terms of infrastructure support. CI software ensures uninterrupted delivery throughout the software development chain. Due to the fact that the complete code repository is still connected to CI systems, it is essential to protect these against unauthorized access.

• Infrastructure teams will need to efficiently manage CI systems as code and environmental complexity rise.

To demonstrate how infrastructure teams might work toward attaining DevOps adoption, let's have a look at a few instances that BJIT has seen over the years.

Scenario 1: My organization does not currently have a DevOps strategy, but we want to be ready.

In this case, implementing agile IT should be your first step. Although the Agile Manifesto, which contains the agile methods and guiding ideas used by developers, does not immediately apply to IT, it does give infrastructure teams a good idea of what to expect.

For instance, if we restate the Agile Manifesto's first two principles, we get:

1. Customer satisfaction is our first focus, and we do this by providing timely and reliable services.
2. Accept shifting needs; agile methods tame change for the benefit of the customer's competitiveness.

The delivery of it must be handled by the infrastructure team. 

Where do we proceed from here? 

• Automating repetitive processes is a good place to start. Follow recommended practices for task setup and hardening when designing automation tasks. When creating automation tasks, adhere to the advised procedures for task setup and hardening. If you operate in storage, automate, for example, the definition of access rules and the provision of storage. If you work in networking, automate the provisioning of ports, VLANs, or BGP sessions.

• Start making progress on implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Workflows that supply consumable resources (compute, storage, and network) with dependable outcomes may be created by orchestrating the automated processes. Please take note that this refers to both real and virtual resources, not only virtual settings.

• Implement a software-defined strategy for everything (SDx). Your company has the adaptability it needs to be responsive to shifting business demands with a software-defined data center.

Permit the abstraction of the infrastructure. Especially with RESTful API interfaces, this enables API integration. Think of APIs as the points where consumable resources are delivered on demand. Platforms and technologies farther down the stack use APIs. If you have standard office equipment, this is usually already supported. If not, speak with your hardware or software manufacturer, since the majority of OEMs now provide APIs for additions and integrations.

Remember: Guard against unauthorized access to your APIs!

Scenario 2: Developers went crazy and adopted modern methods to simplify their work without informing the IT infrastructure teams.

This may be one of the more challenging situations when the infrastructure team finds itself playing catch-up due to the widespread adoption of new technologies that "don't necessitate the infrastructure team."

This circumstance could arise when a development team has exhausted all internal choices and is unable to use a cloud service. The infrastructure team is perceived by the developers as moving too slowly, despite the fact that this is frequently the result of a lack of automation.

For a number of reasons, development teams desire something they can control. 

What options exist for this? 

After requesting a few large virtual machines (VMs) with lots of RAM, storage, and vCPUs, they stop asking for more resources. After some time, they come back and make another significant VM request before departing once more. You are probably dealing with this problem if you are reading this.

Development teams need a centralized resource, regardless of the reason. They are unable to wait for the installation of the necessary libraries or for the infrastructure teams to deploy the appropriate virtual machine.

Scenario 3: Although the company has a DevOps strategy, it has switched to the cloud.

In this situation, the two previous possibilities are merged. Since DevOps doesn't exist in their eyes, infrastructure teams may start creating it. Given how widely utilized cloud-based solutions are inside the organization, they are also a little bit behind the curve.

How do we begin?

• Follow the frameworks and tools. If they are utilizing original versions or do not have governance and lifecycle management procedures in place, this is a form of situation #2 above. 

Corporate solutions that embrace microservices frameworks are compatible with both on-premises and cloud environments. These frameworks frequently provide strong capabilities for hybrid clouds. Consider constructing your infrastructure in a hybrid cloud environment to handle microservice frameworks. A well-implemented, mature microservices architecture enables easy workload migration between on-premises and the public cloud.

• Create a cloud-based user experience for your company. Infrastructure teams must serve as a service broker for the company. Planning for service availability, even in the event of a component failure, should be considered while delivering the cloud experience. Simply buying many clusters of an OEM solution to provide redundancy and marking it as "cloud ready" is not sufficient. Think of a cloud-based system with a storage service. Disk and even node failures occur in the background, although the service is still accessible. We need to make that experience accessible through our infrastructure. We can do some of this with the aid of technologies like software-defined storage (SDS), software-defined networking (SDN), or even software-defined data centers (SDDC).

Conclusion

The DevOps culture helps align people, processes, and tools toward a more united customer focus, making it more than just tools and methods.

DevOps service provider will gain popularity over the next few years as infrastructure virtualization and automation increase. Applications will shortly be released using a factory model. The infrastructure operations team of an organization should focus their attention on learning how to architect new environment configurations for complicated web applications now that environment provisioning only requires a minimal amount of work.

BJIT’s DevOps Framework, automation, operational activity orchestration, communication between development, test, and operations teams, and modification of control mechanisms across the company will all be introduced. This would guarantee the quicker delivery of online software items of greater quality, increasing client satisfaction.