Lessons From the Trenches: How to Deal With the Challenges of Applying Government DevOps

DevOps consists in having both operations and development engineers including other stakeholders participate in the entire service lifecycle. This joint participation begins at the design phase, moves onto the development process, and persists all the way to production support. DevOps can be considered an extension  of the Agile framework to include operational considerations. Another significant characteristic of DevOps is that within that framework, operations staff use many of the same techniques as developers for their systems work.

So what are some of the challenges of applying DevOps to government? 

But, applying the DevOps framework to government structures presents its own set of challenges.

Governments tend to function as siloed units. They are organized in different organizational units  that don't necessarily communicate with one another. In that context, one of the major challenges consists of setting up an organizational structure with a virtual organizational strategy. Another important aspect is figuring out how to explain the DevOps journey to a government structure that deals with various vendors and how to connect the multiple components of the system. 

And of course, DevSecOps also has a prominent role to play when dealing with governments or any other organization with stringent security requirements. Security cannot be an afterthought. It must be implemented at the beginning of the process and must stay the course until delivery.

What to expect from the All Day DevOps Government Track 

Hasan Yasar is the Technical Director of Continuous Deployment of the Capability group at the CMU Software Engineering Institute. Hasan leads an engineering group to enable, accelerate and assure Transformation at the speed of relevance by leveraging DevSecOps, Agile, Lean AI/ML, and other emerging technologies to create a Smart Software Platform/Pipeline. He is also the organizer of the DevOps within government track at this year's ADDO 2021, so we can expect to hear some profound insights.

As Hasan explains, the first objective of each speaker will be to share their personal journey in applying DevOps to government. They will discuss the different barriers they encountered and how they managed to resolve them. 

One example of such a barrier, which can be common to government or high-security organizations, is their internal culture: many times, the different groups within a government agency don't share information with one another.

Another common issue for DevOps within government is that governments tend to keep their systems for a very long time - they are slow to upgrade to avoid any disruptions in their operations. That means that when implementing a DevOps framework to government structures, you need to deal with legacy systems more often than not. 

These issues, among others, are addressed in this track which provides insights on the right strategies to adopt to overcome the most common challenges you might encounter.

Who should attend?

According to Yasar, the ideal attendees are not just those working in government. Any organization that needs to follow strict guidelines and has stringent norms for compliance, like the healthcare industry, the finance industry, or government contractors, will gain some insights from the track. And there are takeaways for people from all levels within these organizations: policymakers and leadership, to be sure, but also all of the different stakeholders involved in the system's life cycle at any level.

Some words of wisdom from Yasar, "When implementing government DevOps, make sure to establish a common set of practices. Then bend your tools, not your processes. Letting the tools drive the organization is a common mistake within these organizations. Government DevOps focuses on developing a common set of practices and then choosing the right tools to support those practices. Join our government DevOps track; your organization will be better for it."

Register for All Day DevOps (ADDO)

All Day DevOps (ADDO), the world's largest DevOps conference, will be streaming live for 24 hours starting at 3 a.m. ET on October 28, 2021. Founded in 2016, the virtual event gathers more than 25,000 DevOps professionals for free, hands-on education. The All Day DevOps is a global community of more than 75,000 DevOps practitioners and thought leaders offering free learning, peer-to-peer insights and networking with professionals worldwide. . Founded in 2016, the community hosts an annual conference, live forums, and ongoing educational experiences online. The 2021 event will feature a lineup of 180+ speakers in six separate tracks, including CI/CD Continuous Everything, Cultural Transformation, DevSecOps, Government, Modern Infrastructure, and Site Reliability Engineering

Register online to participate in the 24-hour live, global event on October 28.