Enhancing DevOps Culture with Liferay DXP

This blog is based on a 2018 Liferay Symposium North America talk given by Liferay Experience Cloud SM Lead Security Officer, Jonathan Lundy.

For organizations that have implemented an agile approach to IT teams, they experience benefits such as transparency, alignment between multiple stakeholders and workload control. But some have taken these benefits even further by embracing DevOps culture to bring efficiency, agility and quality to their development cycles.

What distinguishes a successful DevOps team from a low performing one? Research from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) suggests that there are four questions to answer in order to determine their performance:

1. How often do they deploy?
2. What is their lead time for changes?
3. How long does it take to get services back up?
4. What’s the change failure rate?

Statistics taken from DORA research

 

According to their research, an elite performing DevOps team deploys on-demand, multiple times an hour or day. They can push changes and restore services in less than an hour and their change failure rate averages at less than 15%.

Most importantly, what distinguishes an elite performer from the pack is that they don’t need to juggle the same amount of tasks and manual work. DevOps culture has grown to be a balancing act of dealing with storage, backups, networking, maintenance and security, which has become very overwhelming for most teams. In fact, medium performers spend the most percentage of their time doing manual tasks, even more so than low performers. For these medium performers to outperform those on the lower end for better lead and restoration times and change failure rates, much more manual work is involved. So how can these teams improve their productivity and efficiency in order to become elite performers, who only spend 7% of their time on manual work?

Statistics taken from DORA research

 

Optimizing DevOps Approach with Liferay DXP Cloud

It’s clear that DevOps culture can be improved in many organizations in order for more teams to be successful. That’s why we built Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed (SM).

Liferay Experience Cloud SM is a full-service PaaS designed to launch and mobilize your DXP so that you can worry less about manual tasks to instead focus on innovation and other business priorities. Our team specifically built Liferay Experience Cloud SM using DXP best practices in order to give you more control and ensure optimal performance.

There are six key elements in the platform that can empower teams to become elite performers:

1) Availability:

Our team monitors the infrastructure 24/7 to make sure everything runs smoothly so that you don’t need to. We are committing to 99.95 percent operational uptime, to give you and your customers a reliable experience. But we also provide you with tools to help with your uptime on the application side. These tools include:

• Alerts: Stay up-to-date with real-time alerts and feedback on what’s happening in your application.
• Metrics: Once you receive the alerts, view metrics that will give you actionable data on what’s happening so you can decide what solution to implement.
• Auto Scaling: If you’d rather take a proactive approach, turn on auto scaling. Dynamically scale bandwidth and computing capacity to maintain steady performance even in unexpected traffic peaks. Afterwards, manually downscale at any time to stay flexible and configure the right capabilities for your needs.

These high availability features enable an organization to deploy on-demand, multiple times a day.

2) Automation:

Within the development lifecycle, automation is one of the most powerful tools that developers have. However, it can be very tricky to manage. Simplify those processes with Liferay Experience Cloud SM. The platform provides continuous integration and a Jenkins server out-of-the-box that automatically syncs up with your code so that deployment can be the easiest process. By having clarity on all the builds and all the deployments, you have visibility on the continuous integration and continuous delivery cycle and the ability to see how often you deploy, which builds are applied where, change rate and many others, enabling you to have the time and resources necessary to keep working.

3) Security:

Our team established Liferay Experience Cloud SM with security as the foundation of our operations. We value that you’re trusting us with your business so we want to work alongside you to protect your data and sensitive information. Our InfoSec Program contains our policies and frameworks that help guide our strategic operational decisions regarding risk and change management, incident responses, disaster recovery, etc. There are over 25 policies with 250 controls in total that we’re monitoring on a daily basis. We put our own framework under scrutiny to get a certification like SOC2 and are currently in the process of obtaining other global credentials so that you can rely on Liferay Experience Cloud SM for your mission-critical scenarios.

4) Networking:

Production, development and testing environments often share a common server, but if there’s no clear segregation, this may lead to confusion and errors that can affect other databases. Liferay Experience Cloud SM allows for a complete division of each environment while still keeping important connections between them. Having clear separation ensures that the services inside those environments communicate smoothly with each other in a high-performance way. This segregation is not only beneficial internally, but also externally. Each environment has its own load balancer and proxy, which gives you greater control for each network. These proxies are provided out-of-the-box and the Liferay Experience Cloud SM team maintains them, allowing you to leverage your time elsewhere. In addition, the platform includes VPN features as well to connect and access crucial company data centers for maximum protection.

5) Collaboration:

Teams are strengthened by collaboration so we’ve made it easy for users to collaborate with tools available on the platform by giving access by environment according to roles and permissions. Each user’s activity is then logged in order to monitor and enforce a better governance strategy and provide clarity regarding levels of access. Working together with greater transparency establishes a faster lead time for changes.

6) Storage:

We recognize that storage is a crucial asset, so Liferay Experience Cloud SM enables you to automatically backup your data every hour and restore it when needed. Your data is encrypted at rest at all times to secure your data so that you can restore services as quickly as possible. Keep track of the time, frequency and environment to restore and backup your services.

Become an Elite Performer

DevOps teams don’t need to continue feeling overwhelmed. We want to work together alongside your company to enhance DevOps culture. Leveraging these six features, cut down your lead and restoration time, reduce manual tasks and deploy faster with Liferay Experience Cloud SM.