DevOps

Introduction

Staff of Columbia University IT groups have implemented customized development and operation processes to deploy and support applications in production. CUIT has embarked on a Process transformation program to enable delivering improved outcomes, starting with the initial phases of the Converged Infrastructure Program. This DevOps Project will standardize a formal methodology and toolset that facilitates more reliable, more responsive service delivery.

“DevOps is a software development method that emphasizes communication, collaboration (information sharing and web service usage), integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other IT professionals. The method acknowledges the interdependence of software development, quality assurance (QA), and IT operations, and aims to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services and to improve operations performance.”

Current practices suffer from a number of risks and issues:

• Opportunities for processes and tools standardization

  • SDLC processes from request to deployment and operations vary widely across CUIT groups.

  • A variety of open source, commercial off-the shelf (COTS) and homegrown tools, that frequently performing similar functions, are inconsistently deployed and supported.

• Opportunities for consistent documentation

  • There is little technical documentation of processes, tools and technical architecture available.

  • Where the documentation does exist, it is inconsistent across the organization in terms of what and how process, tools and architecture are described and it is not consistently maintained. For example, project documents delivered by contractors are frequently forgotten about past the project end and are rarely maintained going forward.

• Opportunities to improve turnaround time

  • Time from request to delivery in many phases of the service delivery pipeline is too long. The CI project to date has addressed some of this with improved delivery of VM infrastructure.

• Opportunities to reduce risk of Errors

  • Due to customer urgency to address requests and issues coupled with the lack of necessary process automation and standardization to support needed responsiveness, errors leading to service outages and additional rework sometimes occur..

Participating Business Units

• CUIT

  • RASCAL Project

  • Web Services Project

  • Enterprise Architecture

Deliverables