DevOps pipeline has a variety of tools sets which are connected. In an end to end connected system you won’t get to know where exactly is the bottleneck. It hampers the efficiency across the enterprise. If you will not remove it then it would add to delay in delivery and customer would not get satisfied. But have you ever thought what are the problems which are not allowing your DevOps toolchain to scale and how can you actually scale it? If the answer is No, then you don’t need to worry as we will let you know the exact reason and the way of scaling it.
Problems that don’t allow a DevOps toolchain to scale
In this era of organic growth of businesses, there are very chances when you will see teams sitting to each other. The teams are distributed across various regions and hence sometimes they use different tool sets. There is some interface between the scattered teams which allow them to share the resources and data. If these two teams are working on different toolsets then it becomes a major issue to coordinate the teams as the synchronization will take a lot amount of time.
Sometimes, even in the same team, people start using different tools because of previous expertise. They would be using different processes for doing the same job and hence the efficiency of doing processes in integration decreasing.
Can using the same toolset solve the issue?
It’s very unlikely that using same toolset will solve your issue. First of all, if you decide on a particular toolset and the whole team is asked to switch to that toolset, you may get various issues. The first problem is acquiring licenses. You have to take the licenses of the new tool which you will ask the whole team to work on. Maybe the tools which are already being worked on would be paid earlier for licensing but this would put an additional cost on the organization.
A second important problem is refactoring of code. If you will ask the team to replace the toolset with the new toolset then it would require massive refactoring of code. Infrastructure might also need to be changed or updated based on the new toolset so in short, it would add to the task done by the team.
The third important problem is the knowledge required for the new toolset. It is not necessary that everyone in your team might be aware of the toolset so there might be a delay in the learning process. It is also not guaranteed that the folks who are trained recently on the new tool will deliver the product as they used to deliver earlier.
So, using the same toolset for a team won’t work for big organizations. There should be some another approach to deal with it which will get to know in the latter half. Let’s have a look at the guided approach which can solve your issue of scaling your toolchain.
Solution to the Problem for scaling the toolchain
Now, we will look at the approach which should be followed which would help us in scaling the toolchain. You should have a more integrated system where every team would be allowed to work on toolset which they find relevant and build their pipelines. There can be one DevOps toolset which would integrate those tools which would provide all the required collaboration between the teams. Let’s see the approach in detail.
There are some integrated DevOps toolsets which are available on various cloud service providers. You can use these toolsets and they come with pre-configured integration. You don’t need to do anything to do any configurations as manual settings are already been configured. You can use them immediately. These tool sets will not ask you to change the code or infrastructure. So, in short, your manual efforts would be decreased but if you feel the need of changing the toolset later for the better efficiency then you can do it and integrated toolset would work on it as efficiently as it used to do with the earlier toolset.
You can even have a dashboard which should have the aggregated information from all the tools. These tools will feed the data in the delivery pipeline and that data would be visible on the dashboard. In this way, all stakeholders of the product will be well aware of the statistics of the data and toolsets being used. Along with that, you can have scaled agile framework where the different toolsets would be integrated. It will definitely help in scaling the pipeline.
This approach will help in scaling up the toolchain. In this way, you won’t put any additional burden on the Devops solutions team to learn new toolset and even you don’t need to change code and infrastructure to adapt to the new toolsets.
The advantage of using the above approach for scaling toolchain
Now, you don’t have to mutually decide the toolset on which all the teams would be working on. Teams can have the flexibility to decide toolsets on which they want to work on. Using the above approach will allow them to easily synchronize with each other without putting the scalability at risk. You should definitely bring in the concept of an integrated tool kit that will actually integrate different toolsets and different teams making your delivery toolchain more scalable.
Every team can use the tool which they find best to work on and it won’t even put add on their heads to complete the learning process of the new toolset. Customers would get speedy delivery of the product and what else one wants?
Conclusion
Implement the integrated toolset and make your processes more sstreamlinedand give flexibility to teams to use their own toolset. Hence, it will make your toolchain more scalable. All the best!!