The Five Ss: Lessons From the DevOps Center of Excellence at TCS

It’s a rare opportunity to speak with someone who has DevOps conversations every day with business leaders from around the globe. Today, we get to hear from Chandramohan Moorthyraj, who leads the DevOps Center of Excellence for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

We asked Chandramohan to share his perspective on where DevOps is headed over the next few years. Here’s his response:

The Five Ss

DevOps will focus on the following key areas that I call the Five Ss of DevOps.

• Speed to market
• Scalability
• Security
• Software
• Skill

DevOps enablement is a high-focus area across all organizations now. The industry is moving towards zero-touch and zero-trust deployments. Customers want completely automated DevOps pipelines (CI/CD) standardized across the enterprise. They want this while allowing each business unit to have the choice of their own DevOps tools. This has led to a proliferation of many different tools performing the same function across a single company. 

This works against the company, making it harder for developers to collaborate across teams or to even change teams. To address this problem, we’re seeing enterprise-wide adoption and enablement of DevOps and tools from the CIO/CTO organizations. The most highly evolved firms benefit from top-down enablement, and we see a lot of transformation opportunities in this space.

DevOps is not just about automation. It's about accelerated quality delivery. Hence, testing and security play key roles. Along with CI/CD, automated deployment verification and secrets management capabilities are also key. The performance improvement that we target to achieve with our clients are on-demand deployments, with less than an hour MTTR, and less than 5% of failure rate.

Speed Is Critical

Practices like microservices allow your business operations to move faster. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) automate the software release process for fast and continuous software delivery. A quick release process will allow you to release new features, fix bugs, respond to your customers’ needs, and ultimately, provide your organization with a competitive advantage.

Scalability

Scalability is the key capability of the system for companies adopting enterprise-wide DevOps platforms. For a larger organization, there will be challenges in terms of scalability if they use open-source tools. Hence, we need to be well prepared for scalability while finalizing the DevOps platform.

Security

Organizations mostly depend on SaaS and cloud-hosted tools for their CI/CD infrastructure. It is important to secure these tools proactively and integrate security practices across CI/CD pipelines, not just during the deployments, so that these environments are not being exposed to attacks. While DevOps focuses on speed and agile software development, security is still of high priority in a DevOps environment. Tools such as automated compliance policies, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques will help you reap the speed and efficiencies provided by DevOps, all while maintaining control and compliance of your environment.

Software & Skill

With the right skill and the right software, enablement at scale is possible. With cross-cloud and modern application monitoring, enterprise DevOps platforms can deliver applications using a hybrid delivery model. Efficient usage of DevOps tools along with cloud cost management and Agile development is a key ask from customers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives have become buzzwords across the organizations, but will play an  important role in the complete automation of CI/CD and the software development life cycle.

Conclusion

While DevOps and technology as a whole continue to evolve, the core tenets stay the same. Speed, scalability, security, software, and skill - the Five Ss - are still the pillars that will most help your organization achieve safe, simple software deployment. 

Interested in how this compares to our DevOps Predictions for 2021 and beyond? Read our article and spot the similarities!