CIOs at large, medium and even small organizations nowadays are looking towards transitioning from legacy project-based, waterfall model to uninterrupted delivery of software. DevOps is the proven way to achieve it.

DevOps refers to a methodology as well as cultural shift in the way organizations function. Unlike traditional waterfall model where project moves from one phase to the next (and cannot be reversed), DevOps brings collaboration amongst strategy, product management, development, quality testing, and support teams to provide for continuous cycle of product development, learning, and improvement. It is a necessity for mission-critical projects where infrastructure downtime or failure costs can be high.

While DevOps can help companies deploy applications faster than conventional approach, the journey is far from an overnight transition. There are some critical factors that need to be considered for truly succeeding at DevOps.

Here are the top 5 critical success factors:

1. Leveraging Automation: An important part of DevOps implementation is to develop applications or bring changes to the existing ones at the speed of business. By automating the iterative tasks, the team can focus on more important strategic areas and achieve business objectives within the desired timeline. Moreover, executing changes manually on the infrastructure can be highly complex, time-taking, buggy and inefficient without tools like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, CloudFormation, Terraform, etc. Hence, it is critical to ensure the infra runs without any inconsistencies and behaves in accordance when you’re updating new changes in the applications.

2. Orchestration: Orchestration takes the traditional automation to the next level. It streamlines and joins several automated tasks together to create a process or workflow that speeds up development process. In other words, orchestration breaks the operational silos and makes DevOps a truly collaborative process between developers, operations, and quality assessment teams. Orchestration makes use of already available interfaces. Therefore, the teams do not have to depend on rip and replace approach. They can develop automated workflows from existing APIs and integrate them using an orchestration platform, rather than stopping and re-developing from scratch.

Continue reading the story here.