What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is your conductor in the complex symphony of software development. This Microsoft platform provides a robust set of tools designed to automate, streamline, and optimize your entire software delivery lifecycle (SDLC).
Azure DevOps integrates seamlessly with Git repositories, enabling continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines. This automates code building, testing, and deployment, ensuring rapid and reliable software releases.
Version Control Finesse
Leverage Git integration for superior version control, enabling collaborative development and efficient code-branching strategies.
Define and manage your infrastructure through code using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. This promotes consistency, repeatability, and version control for infrastructure deployments.
Testing
Azure Pipelines empowers you to create and execute automated tests across various frameworks, including unit, integration, and UI testing. This facilitates early bug detection and improved code quality.
Monitoring
Azure DevOps offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities that provide real-time insights into your application's health and performance. This allows for proactive issue identification and quicker resolution times.
Why DevOps?
Why should an organization adopt DevOps as a process? Based on our experience with complex projects, we find that using DevOps as a practice mitigates the risk of slow or ineffective reaction to market developments in an environment of uncertainty, complexity, and rapid change. With DevOps, your business can quickly use its technical capabilities to collaborate effectively, create and deploy higher-quality solutions, and respond appropriately to changing market conditions. The measurable benefit from adopting DevOps is achieving more in less time.
DevOps accelerates a company’s technical capabilities by achieving the following metrics:
shorter time to market (i.e. improved deployment/release frequency)
lower failure rate (through simplified tooling)
shorter lead time between fixes (thanks to better code traceability)
shorter mean time to recovery (with streamlined backlog management).
Alif’s main tool is the Azure DevOps. Its services help in tracking, collaboration, and deployment of project activities and deliverables.
The adoption of Azure DevOps as a tool allows the organization to quickly benefit from all DevOps practices and implement them with ease.
Alif Consulting and DevOps
We believe that work should be engaging, not boring, exciting, and not monotonous. We use full-stack Microsoft technology to free organizations of repetitive tasks. Well-established and proven frameworks allow us to guide organizations toward self-management. The aim of our projects is always to let your employees focus on larger goals. Over 300 companies using our services have been able to:
Secure their digital assets with cost-efficient Microsoft cloud technologies and our own proven in-the-field cloud governance framework.
Get meaningful information from their data by consolidating data sources and generating actionable business insights with machine learning, AI and modern dashboards on Power BI.
Transform their business with modern apps and our custom applications, which increase efficiency and redefine collaboration for greater productivity.
Focus on what matters with our tailor-made managed services to ease their IT management.
We have completed multiple projects for various clients (92% of them recommend us!). This experience has been rewarded with multiple Gold Microsoft competencies, Gold Microsoft Partner association. Our team now counts several professionals, with office locations in UAE and India.
We keep things simple, secure and efficient, but we also know that each business has different needs. That’s why we focus on the most relevant technologies, which will help you thrive long-term in this fast-changing world. Whether it’s maximizing your existing investment, optimizing your processes or getting information from your data – we can guide you towards the right solution, help you achieve your goals and get measurable outcomes from your project.
We currently employ almost (10) full-time employees, including certified Microsoft Professionals.
Why adopt DevOps with Alif Consulting
We delivered more than 10 projects for 10 customers. Most of the projects were delivered using Agile methodology. For the biggest projects, we used Scrum and DevOps practices. We also worked actively with our customers on shifting their mindset to adopting DevOps.
Here is only one of the projects in numbers:
10+ engineers
independent Scrum teams
6+ months
1000+ hours
We have invested a significant amount of time in implementing DevOps, and we feel that we can benefit other organizations from it.
We made our mistakes early on, and now we can help avoid them at Clients.
We’ve been delivering projects using the Scrum framework and DevOps practices since 2016
All internal projects at Alif’s are exclusively led using DevOps practices and the Scrum framework.
Alif’s DevOps Framework
It is a unique offering built around our experience in delivering projects in complex environments and at various organizations. It will help [Company] to adopt an Agile method of working and delivering projects in accordance with DevOps principles.
This service aims to speed up the adoption of DevOps as a practice within organizations. Alif’s team engages with yours, defines the project to be delivered, and helps your team deliver its first iterations.
We truly believe that every organization can benefit from the adoption of DevOps as a practice. Our goal is to impart our knowledge and experience to your project team. We also believe that each project should yield tangible and measurable results. The best way to accelerate that is for you to implement DevOps for new and in-flight projects. It can help you mitigate the issues related to, e.g.
Long waiting times from requirement gathering to deployment – DevOps simplifies collaboration through its tools and processes, meaning that defining the end product and releasing individual iterations is faster.
Traceability problems (linking actual software features to the original requirement) – as all deployments are documented, each feature and bug can be traced to an iteration and instruction.
Errors in deployments, e.g. bugs or security problems – robust testing and versioning help to efficiently address any potential issues
Difficult communication between various teams – user-friendly collaboration tools and practices make it easier to define requirements and exchange feedback
Application lifecycle management being spread across multiple tools – all work is combined in a single tool, so everyone involved in the project can see the progress in real-time and there are no issues in identifying individual versions.
DevOps Architecture
Reference Azure DevOps Architecture using Azure Services
Scope of Work
Below is the list of scope items together with deliverables (products) that Alif will deliver as a part of this consultancy:
1. DevOps maturity assessment
Remote assessment based on the DevOps poll and set of questions about the current Application and its underlying infrastructure, Software life cycle and deployment process.Understanding the technical stack (programming language, OS, frameworks, database etc). After completion of the assessment, an assessment report will be delivered.
2. Azure DevOps Kickstarter
The initial workshop will present the engagement and review the DevOps assessment report. Also, I demonstrated Azure Devops' capability with proof of concept.
3. Azure DevOps Organization
Setting up the Azure DevOps organization, projects, access to all required users & stakeholders, Role-based access policies, and all the required configurations associated with it.
4. Design & Implementation
Implementation will be done as per the below steps:
Implement DevOps development processes using Azure Boards.
Implement Source Control Management using Azure Repos, migration/integration of existing git repositories (if needed)
Implement application infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (ARM templates)
Implement Test automation
Implementation Application performance monitoring
5. Azure DevOps technical workshop
Workshop for the technical team on Azure DevOps covering mostly code repositories and CI/CD automation with all the required documentation
Assumptions
1. [Company] will ensure that the business owner for a project inside of our DevOps Kickstarter engagement will be designated along with a technical team.
2. All parties will participate in required project activities and will be available during this consultancy
3. [Company] is solely responsible for software components released during this consultancy
4. Alif will not be responsible for bugs and downtimes of [Company]’s software inside of our DevOps Kickstarter engagement
5. [Company] will provide a space for Alif’s consultants at [Company]’s office for the duration of this service
6. Alif’s consultants are available during office hours, which are Sunday to Thursday between 9 AM and 5 PM (excluding agreed-upon holidays)
7. Alif’s consultants will limit their guidance to Azure DevOps, Scrum and DevOps practices only
8. Alif’s consultants will not be providing software development or scope consultancy services
9. [Company]’s team will have the necessary knowledge on building and deploying the product selected for the DevOps Kickstarter consultancy
10. Alif will work with [Company]’s team on delivering a project product to production using CI/CD pipelines but only within the expected, planned 5 days. Most likely, it will not be a complete pipeline. Depending on the project specifics and complexity, building a complete CI/CD pipeline will take more time and effort
11. The length of an Agile sprint is 2 weeks, which starts with sprint planning and ends with a retrospective
12. [Company]’s team will amend their approach to development and project management to match Scrum events (planning, daily, retrospective and summary meetings)
13. Every follow-up meeting is scheduled at least 2 weeks in advance
14. During the consultancy, if Alif’s consultants are not available due to force majeure (sickness, other unforeseen events), the delivery timeframe will be adjusted to meet the proposed schedule and project plan.
Out of scope
All activities not listed in the 3 DevOps Implementation - scope section are considered as out of scope, in particular:
Design and active development of [Company]’s products and services
Augmenting [Company]’s staff
Microsoft Azure subscriptions (unless agreed otherwise)
Resources on Microsoft Azure (unless agreed otherwise)
Hardware components and network configuration for on-premises to Azure communication.
What else can we offer?
When implementing a DevOps practice along with Cloud adoption, we recommend that customers also adopt practices related to Cloud environment management and governance
a. Azure DevOps offering
Having basic DevOps practices, tools and a cross-disciplinary team is a good start. Don’t stop there and check out our full offering. We have a long-term proposition where our experts will work together with you on implementing and embedding Agile and Scrum practices. We can also prepare a tailor-made offering for you, where we will work with [Company]’s team on implementing and embedding Agile and Scrum practices, but we will also have experts working with you on building and delivering the actual product to production.
b. Cloud Migration Solutions
c.MS0365 Migration Solutions
d.Azure Backup and DR Solutions
e. Cloud Shared Services
The goal of a Cloud Shared Services (CSS) subscription is to design and implement one of the key elements of Azure deployment: a shared subscription for all services deployed in Azure that provides key components and services. A Cloud Shared Subscription provides a foundation to connect [Company]’s on-premises environment and Microsoft Azure Cloud environment, with all elements required to deploy further workloads. The subscription removes the need to make decisions and designs for every new subscription or workload. We offer Cloud Shared Services as well. Please let us know, and we will explain why this service is a must-have when working with the public Cloud.
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