“The Department of Veterans Affairs logged 5.6 million episodes of care for veterans in 2020 and has introduced over 52 new systems in response to COVID-19. Especially with the pivot to increasingly virtual environments, much of this was accomplished using DevSecOps.
‘The key to the success we’ve had is speed. The speed to deliver new products and pivot to COVID-19 was critical,’ said Daniel McCune, VA’s executive director of application management during a MeriTalk webinar…”
“The increased developments in cloud prior to the pandemic enabled the agency to quickly pivot around sudden demands like those for telehealth.
‘We’ve done a lot of lifting and shifting in the cloud. A large percentage of our applications have been in the cloud, and that paid dividends when we got to telehealth. We were able to scale rapidly, easily and quickly because of the cloud,’ McCune said…”
“VA has leveraged blue-green testing, an application release model that gradually transfers user traffic from a previous version of an application to a nearly identical new release, both of which are running in production.
Shifting culture has also been a focus in VA’s DevOps transformation. McCune said that there has to be a ‘mind share’ to foster new ideas and innovation for any organizational transformation. VA recently invested in DevOps Days, a campaign to continually share DevOps best practices and success stories, which became a ‘drum beat’ for the department…” Read the full article here.
Source: VA’s DevOps Mindset Enables Faster Service Launches – By Sarah Sybert, May 5, 2021. GovernmentCIO.
