News

In February 2019, SoftEd launches a new course entitled 'Implementing DevOps' to meet the growing demand for DevOps and agile practices.  The ICAgile accredited course is now available for in-house bookings and public course bookings in Australia and New Zealand.

We recently spoke to SoftEd trainer and coach, Colin Garlick about the brand new course.

Why should organisations be looking to implement DevOps?

A big need today is to get change quickly into the hands of the users, without downtime and without compromising on quality.  DevOps provides the practices and techniques that are necessary to move faster in a safe fashion.  By focussing on quality in every step of the process, DevOps allows the decision of when to deploy to production to be a business decision, rather than one that is subject to technical constraints.

What does this course cover?

This course addresses the steps that would be taken in practice.  Before building anything, the objectives are identified, lean principles are applied to identify inefficiencies, a suitable architecture is established, and a pipeline to take code safely from development to production is defined.  This pipeline is then implemented, including the automated provisioning, configuration, and deployment of the appropriate environments.  Logging and telemetry is then implemented in all environments, allowing fast failure recovery and continual improvement of both systems and processes.  Improvements can also include changes to the deployment architecture.

How does it build on the Foundation of DevOps course?

DevOps requires a good foundation in place before starting to use DevOps tools and techniques.  Going down a DevOps path without that foundation is likely to result in more failures and greater customer/user dissatisfaction.  Our Foundations of DevOps course looks at what is required for a good foundation in terms of the organisational culture, mindset, and technical practices.  Its focus is on identifying what changes should be made now in order to increase the chance of success when properly applying DevOps tools and techniques.

The Implementing DevOps course picks up at this point, working on the basis that a good foundation already exists.  It considers what a DevOps implementation looks like, and includes hands-on use of some of the tools for the participants to experience the benefits of the DevOps approach.

Who is the course for and why do they need to come along? 

The primary audience is for developers and operations staff who want to understand the technical practices of DevOps and experience how the tools support DevOps.  While there are aspects of procedure and policy, this technical and hands-on course is primarily for practitioners.

It is one thing to learn how to use a tool, but the tool should be there to support the overall process.  This course considers the tools in this wider context, making sure that the tools we use and how we use them to support the overall goals (e.g. delivering faster and more reliably).

What skills will they take away?

Participants will take away an understanding of the policies and procedures that are needed to support the technical side of DevOps, and why they are necessary.  They will have experience using some of the tools to quickly and safely move code changes through to being deployed in production and monitoring systems so that failures can be quickly diagnosed and addressed.

For more information about this course or to book, click here.