DappOps

Metaverse refers to the concept of a highly immersive virtual world where people gather to socialize, play, and work, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Grand View Research reveals in a study report that the global metaverse market is estimated to reach USD 678.8 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 39.4%. In Jon Radoff's conceptual framework, metaverse is composed of seven layers: Experience, Discovery, Creator Economy, Spatial Computing, Decentralization, Human Interface, and Infrastructure. The decentralization part includes smart contracts, edge computing, AI agents, open-source platforms, and self-sovereign digital identity, with key enablers of blockchain and microservices.

A Decentralized application (Dapp) is a solution that uses smart contracts and UI to operate autonomously, and run on a distributed ledger, blockchain, or other decentralized computing system. Dapps are not centralized by nature, become trustable, ensure high uptime, scale well, and cost less in development and operations. Some Dapp examples include Steemit, Uniswap, and CryptoKitties.

Dapps have grown dramatically in the last few years, with a variety of solutions built in many industry sectors like finance, healthcare, education, and gaming. Though, project teams have faced different barriers and constraints, such as difficulty to update and deploy, compulsory management of a secret key to sign a transaction, and mandate of a wallet loaded with tokens or coins, to name just a few. An overarching approach is a necessity to help address the above-mentioned concerns and obstacles, to guide practitioners from a lifecycle perspective.

DappOps is a discipline that combines principles, patterns, cultural philosophies, techniques, and tools to enable and enhance an organization’s capability in delivering decentralized applications and services at high velocity. DappOps provides a practice framework that promotes clearer process, improved agility, faster feedbacks, lower cost, higher-quality code, reliable version control, shorter testing cycles, effective management, and enhanced productivity. DappOps comprises 16 components:

• Plan
• background legwork to start a business case and initiative
• Discover
• explore and conceptualize a product/service
• Define
• gather/specify the requirements and project scope
• Design
• model and architect a solution
• Develop
• construct elements and components
• Code
• implement business logic, rules, and persistence
• Engineer
• set up environments, access, repos, Kanban, etc.
• Build
• commit codebase and create runnable instances iteratively
• Integrate
• connect with other systems/platforms and scan/test
• Deploy
• install and promote to runtime environments
• Operate
• run the solution with support and incident management
• Monitor
• trace the observability metrics, health and SLA
• Interoperate
• leverage multicloud and distribute workloads dynamically
• Mesh
• handle service reliability and quality
• Curate
• detect data/model drifts and hold models responsible
• Govern
• manage risks, resources, and TCO/RIO

DappOps facilitates better collaboration systematically, addressing process, people, platform and pattern at its core. As illustrated in the diagram, the DappOps components can be mapped to the phases in the project execution, with some sequential dependencies. However, DappOps is by no means a waterfall process. Rather it is incremental and iterative in operationalization. In addition, DappOps is highly expandable and customizable to adapt to individual needs and unique challenges.

For more information, please contact Tony Shan (blog@tonyshan.com) or leave your comments below.

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