The influx of internet and software has transformed the way consumers shop, invest, learn or even entertain themselves. It has also influenced the way businesses are being operated. It is the age of internet and software that not just supports businesses but has become integral components of every part of a business.
Organizations interact with their customers through software, teams collaborate using specific applications, enterprises use software for increasing operational efficiencies and transforming every part of the value chain, such as communications, logistics, and operations.
Do you think you adapt to this swift change and compete with challenges?
Do you want to be more efficient like your peers in delivering the best features to end-users?
That’s where DevOps methodology comes into the picture. DevOps culture aims to simplify the development process of software, enabling engineers to build, test and maintain the infrastructure and tools. It makes sure speedy development and release of the software.
However, every development strategy with DevOps requires an additional set of skills specific to its environment.
What is DevOps?
A compound of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is a combination of a culture, set of processes, tools to continually develop software in a hassle-free way and provide value to customers. It allows your team to create and improve applications and services at a higher velocity than they can do with traditional software development approaches.
Using DevOps means you are evolving and enhancing practices at a faster pace when compared with firms that use old-aged software development and infrastructure management processes. The speed you attain in developing software with DevOps lets you better serve your customers and compete more efficiently in the market.
DevOps Benefits
By adopting a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, you better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications you build and achieve business goals faster. DevOps culture, tools and practices let you become high-performing, build products faster for greater customer satisfaction, establish improved collaboration and productivity, maintain system stability and reliability, improve the meantime to recovery and achieve business goals.
- Speed – The DevOps model strengthens you to move at high velocity towards your goals. It empowers your developers and operations team to innovate for customers faster, adapt to changing markets better and grow more efficiently at driving business results. For instance, continuous delivery and microservices let your team take ownership of services and then release updates to them faster.
- Rapid Delivery – With DevOps methodology, you can speed up the frequency and pace of release, thereby innovating and improving your product delivery process faster. The quicker new features are released and bugs fixed, the faster you can address customers’ requirements and build competitive advantages.
- Reliability – DevOps model helps you determine the quality of application updates and infrastructure changes so that you can deliver projects at a more rapid pace as well as maintain a positive experience for end-users. Use practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery to test that each change is functional and safe. Monitoring and logging practices of DevOps enable you to stay informed of performance in real-time.
- Stabilized Work Environment – Stress involved during the release of new features and updates or fixes can topple the stability of your workspace, thereby decreasing the overall productivity. With DevOps culture, you can improve your work environment with a steady and well-balanced approach.
- Scale – Easily operate and manage infrastructure and development processes at scale. Consistency and automation allow you to manage complex changing systems effectively with lower risks. To take an example, infrastructure as code enables you to manage your development, testing, and production environment in a repeatable and more efficient manner.
- Better Collaboration – Develop a more competent and effective team under DevOps cultural model, which emphasizes values such as accountability and ownership. Your operations team and developers can collaborate closely, combine their workflows and share responsibilities. This leads to reduced inefficiencies and better time saving. For example, less time is consumed in handing over periods between developers and operations, writing code that requires the environment in which it is run.
- Security – Move at a rapid pace while preserving compliance and retaining control. You are able to adopt a DevOps model without eliminating security by using automated compliance profiles, configuration management techniques and fine-grained controls. (e.g. using policy as code and infrastructure as code, you will be able to easily define and then track compliance at scale).
DevOps and the Application Lifecycle
DevOps methodology can have an impact on the application lifecycle throughout its phases that are ‘plan’, ‘develop’, ‘deliver’ and ‘operate.’ Every phase relies on the others. And these phases are not role-centric. In a true DevOps practice, each role is involved in each phase to some extent.
- Plan – In this phase, DevOps teams ideate, define and describe capabilities and features of the systems and applications they are developing. They can track the progress at low and high levels of granularity. Some of the ways DevOps teams can plan with agility and visibility are tracking bugs, creating backlogs, using Kanban boards, managing agile software development with Scrum and visualizing progress with dashboards.
- Develop – This phase is a combination of coding – writing, testing, reviewing and integrating code as well as building that code into build artifacts that can be deployed into different environments. DevOps teams innovate rapidly without compromising on stability, quality and productivity. For this, they use extremely productive tools, automate mundane and manual steps and iterate in small increments through automated testing and continuous integration.
- Deliver – Delivery is the process of deploying applications into production environments consistently in a reliable manner. The ‘deliver phase’ also includes configuring and deploying fully governed foundational infrastructure that can make up those environments. In this phase, the team can define the release management process with clear manual approval stages, and set automated gates that move applications between stages until they are made available to customers. Automating these processes makes your team repeatable, scalable, and controlled. So, the team that practices DevOps has the potential to deliver fast services with confidence and ease.
- Operate – This phase includes maintaining, monitoring, and troubleshooting applications in production environments. By adopting DevOps methodologies, your team can work to make sure system reliability, high availability, and zero downtime while reinforcing security and governance. They will be able to identify issues before they (issues) affect customer experience and full visibility into applications and the underlying system.
Why DevOps Matters
The tech landscape is an integral part of the change. It creates an ever-changing environment: frameworks come and go; languages evolve and new ones are created; infrastructure tools change to meet the ever-growing demands for hosting applications more efficiently and delivering services more quickly; tools continue to abstract low-level computing to reduce engineering overhead.
What only remains constant is ‘CHANGE.’ Your ability to cater to that change determines your success as an individual contributor or entrepreneur. Regardless of the industry, your business is associated with, it is important to adapt quickly and eliminate as much friction from growth as possible. DevOps enables you to adapt to the change and grow your business.