Software applications are more complex than ever. If your application is slow or down for even five minutes customers will blow up on Twitter for the whole world to see. To prevent this, developers and operations have to work together in lockstep when deploying and supporting applications. Preventing and fixing application problems quickly is critical to keep your outage from becoming a trending topic on Twitter.
The DevOps Movement Begins
For software developers, ensuring early success of your new application starts with keeping IT operations in the loop. Traditionally a lot of software development teams have worked for months on new projects and then thrown them at the IT operations team at the last minute when it came time to deploy them. If you want a good example of this, look no further than the big healthcare.gov debacle. The DevOps movement started originally to try and solve that problem. It fosters a culture of keeping development and IT operations working together from the beginning to the end of the project so software deployments go more smoothly.
Long-term success of your application depends on proper maintenance and monitoring of your applications as you continue to roll out new features. Thanks to agile development, that is usually a weekly or monthly cycle at most companies. A constant stream of new features is awesome, but with that comes some risk in introducing new bugs, performance problems, or instability. This constant stream of change coupled with the overall complexity of today’s applications makes them difficult to support
Application Support: “It Takes a Village”
Collaboration between developers and IT operations is needed to keep your applications running and your customers happy. If you only have a couple senior developers who handle all the production support issues they will have little time to deal with more important issues like architecting new features.
The key to supporting production applications is removing the bottlenecks and getting more people involved in application support. Operations needs to make sure that the development team has visibility of basic troubleshooting information like errors, logs, and key metrics while ensuring security.. Without this information it is hard for developers to fix basic bugs and improve application performance. They must contact other developers or system administrators for help which creates a huge bottleneck. You could say “It takes a village.”
Granting access to production data raises both security concerns and fear of unauthorized changes to the servers without going through proper release processes. However, developers don’t really need administrator level access to servers (jumping between dozens of servers is not very efficient anyways), they just need visibility to the aggregated information. This will allow them to find the source of the problem fast, while not creating any security risks or letting developers create new issues while fixing others.
DevOps Should Include Production Support
The goal of DevOps is to create collaboration and improve the working relationships between development and operations. The DevOps movement initially started focusing on software deployment and continuous delivery. However, support of production applications is the second and equally important component in the application lifecycle that is sometimes overlooked. To solve production problems quickly, developers and operations can not be pointing fingers at each other. They need to work together as a team.
To help support production applications, developer need access to lots of data:
- Visibility and notifications around all application errors
- Access to centralized aggregated log files for viewing and searching
- Basic server utilization trends and stats. (e.g. CPU, memory, etc)
- Recording and alerting of key application metrics (KPIs)
- Tracking of application web page load times
- Ability to access the application database and run test queries
Most companies utilize several different tools to track all of this data. This makes it difficult to correlate and identify issues. It is also very hard to train all team members on how to effectively use all the available tools, not to mention the economic inefficiency. Companies should look for solutions that combine these features into one dashboard so that solving issues can be done quickly and with minimal training.
Companies should look for tools that gives developers access to all the data they need to monitor and troubleshoot production applications, without giving them administrator type access to all the servers. One application dashboard that will show them where the app is deployed, the current health, performance stats, recent errors, full logs, and key metrics. This is what we try to do here in Stackify – to make it easy for companies to embrace DevOps when it comes to supporting production applications. Some of our customers have shared with us how DevOps affected their organization. We would love to hear how DevOps has affected your company.
About the Author/Matt Watson
Matt Watson founded Stackify in 2012 and as CEO provides the vision and leadership for the direction of the company. Prior to founding Stackify, he was the founder and CTO of VinSolutions. VinSolutions’ innovative product offering led to rapid company growth and was even featured on the Inc. 500 (#447) in 2010. Matt is an entrepreneur at heart and excels at product and software development.
Feature photo by JD Hancock
