How is Atlassian pushing for open devops

Dan Tombs

Hi All,

I just wanted to share an article I wrote not too long ago regarding the open DevOps platform Atlassian is creating. You can view the article HERE.

 

Since it’s inception, Atlassian has always surrounded itself with agile ways of thinking. But like all, times have moved on, but the mindset of challenge the way we do hasn’t. DevOps pushes this mindset. It brings forward two major areas that have often struggled to see eye to eye in a way that is only beneficial for all members of staff and the business. In this article we learn what Atlassian did in 2022 and are doing in 2023 to improve their tools to facilitate DevOps.

WHAT IS DEVOPS?

DevOps, a combination of both development and operations, is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between the software development teams that write the code and IT teams who deploy and support the platform long term. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration.

DevOps started to become popular around 2007 when teams wanted to break away from more traditional software development methods. Teams often were siloed creating many barriers to resolution as well as an unjust and unfair dislike between the two sides. Its biggest aim is to create an unbroken, constantly evolving bond right from the beginning of the software development process all the way up until deployment known as the DevOps infinity loop.

DEVOPS TOOLCHAIN CHALLENGES

Since there are so many different parts of DevOps, each teams tool chain can often come quite complex. Many teams told Atlassian that on average 25 different applications were used to form their SDLC and that 10% of all engineer time is spent just managing these applications, making sure they are as efficient as possible.

While standardising to specific tools or tools made by single suppliers can make sense, it will hinder rather then help in the long term.

Christopher Condo wrote

“Vendors that don’t allow freedom of choice and revert to a captive, exclusive approach will suffer. No matter how good their tools are, the DevOps marketplace will always outpace them”.

In essence, you could be the most amazing company in the world, but the wider your spread along the infinity loop, the thinner the resources available and the less focus in development you can provide each application.

While this quote is directed more towards to vendors of these applications, it has a direct impact on customers who decide to keep their DevOps toolchain all under one roof. It is best to spread across multiple vendors and create a best of breed set of applications for your business.

WHAT IS AN OPEN DEVOPS CULTURE?

Open DevOps is the direct combatant to this. Its ideas is that no single vendor should force your hand or limit you to working with specific tools in order to work well. Effectively an open DevOps platform is powered by integrations between as many third party applications so you & your team can embrace the freedom of choice and productivity from an unchained approach. You choose your tools based on what works for you and the applications just work seamlessly.

WHEN DID ATLASSIAN ANNOUNCE THIS

In 2021 Atlassian announced their shift to an open DevOps model. They recognised, that they could not be a single supplier power, nor was it a smart move to continue thinking along this model. While Jira Software is their base platform, they allow integrations with what would otherwise seem as seemingly disparate tools giving you flexibility while still having an easy to view command centre where you work every day. to check our more on Atlassian’s view on open DevOps, click HERE

HOW ARE THEY CURRENTLY WORKING TOWARDS IT?

TOOLING CHANGES

Firstly, they have their toolchain page, found within every software project. This page gives you a centralised look at your pre existing integrations as well as those still available to you. This provides your team an opportunity to visualise their toolchain and also identify gaps as to where further improvements and productivity can be identified in their toolchain.

Credit: Atlassian

With each integration comes great new capabilities. Now there are many other applications and improvements to existing apps that Atlassian have been making since the 2021 announcement, way too many to name here. If you want to see all the changes they have made I’d recommend reviewing the following links:

• Compass

• Jira Product Discovery

• Open DevOps

• 2022 Open DevOps review

CULTURAL CHANGES

Atlassian wanted to add an additional step into the loop. Plan. This step is there to showcase all the brilliant work that often goes unnoticed when developing new features. While this work can be great, developers can often be found not understanding the why between new ideas and what they are writing. Your projects can integrate with design & whiteboarding tools like Miro, Mural, Figma etc. to help plug this gap.

You can also now get project insights. These insights can help showcase to each and every team how they are actually doing, helping predict the likelihood against success based on their own metrics. While these metrics are not really knew, having them so close to where the work is can provide better visibility & understanding, empowering teams to make smarter decisions and drive the desired outcomes at the time.

To check out more on what Insights are available, click HERE.

Atlassian also provide us code insights directly from the board view. You’ll be able to see icons all any issue where branches, commits, PRs etc. have been made against an issue. This is there to help provide transparency for anyone viewing what the team are doing and where things within the pipeline may be enabling teams to see where resources may be required to push things over the line.

Compass is a fairly new product to Atlassian. It helps facilitate the all important you build you support ideology behind DevOps. Compass allows for teams to track component relationships from large scale applications to the libraries used as well as all other important metadata. But the most important part of Compass that supports the cultural aspect of DevOps is its CheckOps. CheckOps is where your developers check in weekly with those required to review the scorecards and health of the components they look after. If scores are low, the team can use this time to better shape conversations as to why and what they can do to get them back to the green. On call engineers can also provide handovers as to what incidents involved what components, creating tighter and faster feedback loops between those maintaining and those developing.

The CheckOps allows the team to pulse check themselves and a safe and honest environment each week as well as reflect how things went and where future improvements can be made.

The slight changes in cultural behaviour are what lead to large benefits.

RECOGNISED STRENGTHS

With Jira Software playing an already vital role for your teams to manage and visualise their workload, transforming it into the centralised command centre for the rest of your DevOps toolchain makes a lot of sense. It brings all the information into a single pane of glass allowing your teams to make better informed decisions on the work they do and the affect is has in your ecosystem.

This offering is free to any offering within cloud. Whether you are using standard or enterprise, 10 users or 10,000 users, incorporating your entire development chain is an option. Along with being free, Atlassian wanted to make sure that it could offer this with as much aligned autonomy as possible, basically meaning that, wherever possible, power was given to the project administrators and the team directly to integrate their tools without having to disturb admins to do it for them. Yes there are some things that require admins to do, but since it is the teams tool stack they should have the aligned autonomy to manage it.

RECOGNISED WEAKNESSES.

While the future is cloud for Atlassian, there still some that require DC due to the current limitations in the offering (data residency etc.). While I am sure these limitations will go over time, anyone on the On-Prem versions of Jira will now have access to the Open DevOps platform.

The number of integrations is growing all the time, but with so many applications on the market for different parts of the infinity loop, you will probably find that some of your applications are not available yet. However, being totally honest, you’ll never be able to integrate every single offering so this isn’t really a downfall on Atlassian but more of around setting your expectations. Atlassian have made it easy to easily request it an integration. You can find the link for requesting a new integration at the bottom of the toolchain window. To put a positive spin on this, it may be a chance for you and your team to review how you work and what you work with. Maybe there are some better tools that exist on the market where integrations already exist which you could switch to.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE FOR THIS?

Team ‘23 should provide great insights to Atlassian’s plans. I’m predicting a heaving continued development with Compass and further integrations with applications within the toolchain. Atlassian have been continuing to develop strong relationships with particular market leaders like Snyk, so you will find particular existing integrations to only get smarter and a push to using their recommended suppliers.