CTO Round Table: DevOps for CTOs

Aug 10, 2023, 2:00 – 6:00 PM (UTC)

Africa's Talking Community

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). If you are a CTO or an Engineering Lead Get your ticket and let us deep dive!

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Best PracticesCommunity

About this event

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). The goal of DevOps is to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high quality. Also, DevOps is a cultural change that requires a shift in mindset and a commitment to collaboration. It is not a set of tools or processes, but rather a way of thinking about how to build and deliver software. There are a number of ways that CTOs can adopt DevOps. One way is to create a DevOps team[i]. This team should include representatives from both development and operations. Another way to adopt DevOps is to implement a DevOps tool[ii]. There are a number of DevOps tools available, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. CTOs should carefully evaluate the different tools before selecting one.


Building a successful DevOps team

Building a successful DevOps team is a complex and challenging task, but it can be

done with careful planning and execution. To achieve this, a couple of things needs

to be done:

Define your goals. What do you hope to achieve by implementing DevOps? Do you want to improve your release velocity? Reduce your time to market? Increase your operational efficiency? Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start to build a team that has the skills and experience to help you reach your goals.

Assemble the right team. A successful DevOps team will be made up of people with a variety of skills, including development, operations, and security. You'll also need people who are good at communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Create a culture of continuous improvement. DevOps is all about continuous improvement. Your team should be constantly looking for ways to improve their processes and tools. This will require a culture of experimentation and risk-taking.

Embrace automation. Automation is essential for DevOps. By automating as much of your development and operations work as possible, you can free up your team to focus on more strategic tasks.

Measure your progress. It's important to measure your progress and make adjustments to your approach as needed. 

There are a number of Key performance Indicator(KPI) you can use to track your progress. These are

  • Release velocity
  • Time to market
  • Operational efficiency.

Worth noting, building a successful DevOps team takes time and effort, but it's worth it. If followed well, the following though may vary from organization to organization, tips can help in building a successful DevOps team:

  • Get buy-in from senior leadership. DevOps is a cultural change, and it's important to have the support of senior leadership if you want to be successful.
  • Start small. Don't try to implement DevOps across your entire organization all at once. Start with a small team or project and learn from your mistakes.
  • Be patient. It takes time to build a successful DevOps team. Don't expect to see results overnight.
Implement different selected DevOps tools

After a successful creation of a DevOps team, it time to now implement DevOps in the organization. Also this is the time we now align with the first thing we did while creating our team which was defining our goals. What we want to achieve with

DevOps. Starting from here, do the following:

  1. Research different tools. There are a number of different DevOps tools available, so it's important to research different options before making a decision. Consider the features and capabilities of each tool, as well as your specific needs.
  2. Pilot a few tools. Once you've selected a few tools, it's a good idea to pilot them in a small environment before rolling them out to your entire organization. This will help you identify any potential issues and make sure the tools are a good fit for your needs.
  3. Train your team. Once you've selected and piloted your tools, it's important to train your team on how to use them. This will help ensure that the tools are used effectively and that your team can get the most out of them. This usually applies if you never met the first step of creating a strong DevOps team.
  4. Measure your results. It's important to measure the results of your DevOps implementation efforts. This will help you determine whether the tools are helping you achieve your goals.

Here are some of the most popular DevOps tools: Remember DevOps starts with CI/CD

  • Jenkins is a continuous integration (CI) server that helps automate the process of building, testing, and deploying software. Jenkins is based in Java. You can go for CircleCI, TravisCI, GitlabCI.
  • Ansible is a configuration management tool that helps automate the process of deploying and configuring infrastructure. Alternative is Puppet and Chef. Ansible is python based.
  • Docker is a containerization platform that helps create and deploy portable applications. Worth noting, this is a modern approach of building applications and should not be ignored.
  • Kubernetes is a container orchestration platform that helps manage and scale containerized applications. It is usually best to be used by large enterprises with large loads of traffic in their applications. For small sized organizations, docker-compose and swarm should be the best ways of container orchestrations.
  • Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system that helps collect and store metrics from your applications and infrastructure. This works as a data source for Grafana most of the times.
  • Grafana is an open-source visualization tool that helps you visualize the data collected by Prometheus. Alternatives are New Relic, ELK, TICK.


Github Repos on how to implement Docker, Docker-compose, CircleCI and Ansible

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Speaker

  • Joseph Njogu

    ARC Ride

    Software & DevOps Engineer

Featured Attendees

  • Michael Mwaura

    Vumicentral.com

    Product Designer & CTO

  • Samuel Mwangi

    Africa's Talking

    Infra Engineer

  • IAN KIPRONO

    Freshlife

    Developer

  • Peter Tepela

    BodaPay

    R&D

When

When

Thursday, August 10, 2023
2:00 PM – 6:00 PM (UTC)

Agenda

2:00 PMRegistration and Welcome
2:15 PMDevOps for CTOS
4:30 PMNetworking

Host

  • Michael Kimathi

    Africa's Talking

    Head of Developer Community

Organizers

  • Bennett Benedict

    University of Dar Es Salaam

    Community Lead, 🇹🇿 Tanzania

  • Veronica Michael

    Community Lead, 🇹🇿 Tanzania

  • Josphat Mwangi

    Community Co-Lead, 🇰🇪 Kenya

  • Sheriffo Jarju

    Community Lead, 🇬🇲 The Gambia

  • Sanusi Abdulkadir

    Community Lead, 🇳🇬 Kaduna, Nigeria

  • Josh Venceslas

    Altech Group

    Community Co-Lead, 🇷🇼 Rwanda

  • David Okwii

    Sitemonki

    Community Co-Lead, 🇺🇬 Uganda

  • Cynthia Moraa

    Africastalking LTD

    WIT Community Lead 🇰🇪 Kenya

  • Alexander Ikeh

    Community Co-Lead Abuja, 🇳🇬 Nigeria

  • Aaron Ujah

    Community Co-Lead, Abuja, 🇳🇬 Nigeria

  • Roland Ganafa

    Africa'sTalking Uganda

    Community Co-Lead, 🇺🇬 Uganda

  • Stanislaus Sakwiya

    MlimiPay Limited

    Community Lead, 🇲🇼 Malawi

  • Jackson Ngabonziza

    Community Co-Lead 🇷🇼 Rwanda

  • Muhindi Asena

    Community Co-Lead, 🇰🇪 Kenya

  • Destino Alain DELLO

    FnStack

    Community Lead, Congo