Insights Into Federal Agile Transformation Q&A: How to be an Agile DevOps Leader
Welcome to the Makpar Insights Into Federal Agile Transformation content series designed to provide federal IT leaders with all of the strategic tools and insights they need to best leverage Agile development today – and into the future.
In this installment, we speak with Grant Moore, a DevOps Engineer at Makpar, who provides insights into how to be an Agile DevOps leader.
The following conversation has been edited for length.
Q: Why is being an Agile DevOps leader important?
An Agile DevOps leader essentially sets the standards for everything. If you want to be an Agile organization, you need to develop a pipeline that automates deployments, and you need to ensure that the right processes are in place.
With the right leadership, it minimizes the actual maintenance of the applications, and allows the team to focus only on development. By having a well-defined DevOps processes, developers don’t really have to worry about networking for firewalls, as an example, and everything is set up in advance.
The Makar Innovation Lab is moving towards this type of process where we are using containerization and a Kubernetes cluster to have the entire development platform in a single template that we give to the cloud. Ultimately, this will stand up an entire infrastructure, which minimizes the actual maintenance of the application and allows the team to only focus on development.
Q: How do you do it?
There are different ways to approach being an Agile DevOps leader. Ideally, the approach should be independent of the cloud provider, and be as cloud-agnostic as possible.
By working towards a containerized solution, it is possible to give the cloud instructions on how to build your application. This is a micro-services architecture, and is achieved by developing applications with the right mindset. Automation plays a big role in this as well, and allows us to move away from manual processes.
Getting away from a paradigm where you are managing your server to a new paradigm where you are declaring how your cloud is configured is the ultimate goal.
Q: What makes Makpar’s process special?
We are always seeking improvement. We also have a sophisticated set up where we use modern technologies and server-less functions, and we let the cloud manage our run time environments. This allows us to focus on the important work of actually developing the code – making the whole DevOps process much smoother.
Be sure to check out our previous installments of the Makpar Insights Into Federal Agile Transformation content series:
Makpar is pioneering pragmatic Agile development for government through methods such as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean development. Our Agile practice minimizes communication gaps between Development and Operations teams by expanding DevOps-based automation to the entire development lifecycle. Please click here to learn more.