DevOps | A Whole New Approach for Business Success

We’re acquainted with the modus operandi of IT department. In a typical setup, the development teams work on the development of new features for end users. Meanwhile, operations teams account for the software, service, run-time, availability, and reliability aspects. In the ideal situation, the tussle between these two teams results into a productive balance. But, too often, this does not happen. The teams see each other as an obstacle when it comes to a product delivery. Enter the DevOps for business, which is often considered as a ‘silver bullet’ to improve IT efficiency. 

DevOps is a new IT discipline which combines software development and operations principles with the main objective of enabling organizations to develop products with greater speed and efficiency. This is one of major reasons why companies are turning to DevOps for their project development.

What exactly is DevOps?

The term DevOps is a short for “Development” and “Operations”. It means a set of organizational practices that streamlines cooperation and collaboration between the development and operations teams. Put simply, it combines a whole bunch of processes including software development, QA, and IT operations such as reviewing, testing, deploying, etc. And enables faster development and easier maintenance of underlying deployments. 

DevOps promotes shorter iterations through agile practice and new automation tools. Not a technology per se, but DevOps automation is the transformation of the IT operating model from organization to culture, processes to tool-led automation.  

Cultural, Operational and Practical Goals of DevOps

In today’s fast-paced environment, businesses need to develop digital products faster than ever before to keep up with the increasing customer needs. To do this, they must implement DevOps practices.

Here’s what businesses can achieve by implementing DevOps

- Automated software delivery – including development, testing, infrastructure configuration and management.

- Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

- The DevOps artifact repository for build processes.

- The versioning system and iterative development.

- Frequent releases and application release automation.

- Real-time monitoring, code review, and continuous feedback integration.

A cultural shift in mindset – blurring the line between two teams, development and operations.

Why DevOps is Crucial for Business

DevOps adoption is speeding up. In fact, a research from IDC forecasts that DevOps software market to reach $15 billion in 2023.

It’s no secret that every business is embracing digital transformation to thrive in this dynamic market. To enable that transformation, organizations must look forward to changing the ways they operate. Enterprise applications are the key differentiator between those who bring new wave of transformation or those who will fall behind. For modern web applications, software, mobile solution, DevOps for business is the key. 

Here are some crucial benefits that businesses can harness from DevOps practice. 

Reduced Operational Expenses

With continuous software development aspect of DevOps, companies can reduce operational costs. Businesses can make use of freemium tools to automate specific parts in the application development process. For example, using Gradle, Jenkins or Selenium, IT team can find greater control on modifying product code in contrast to proprietary software. 

When it comes to process automation, DevOps enables teams to build their own automated programs. Such automated scripts can be configured into the system and can be retriggered when needed. They can automate repetitive tasks such as monitoring applications, generating reports, and fixing issues which would otherwise need a separate team.

In this way, DevOps helps organizations to save a fair amount of time and capital expenditure. Application development -following DevOps culture- can be done using containerization. Containerization refers to a software unit that enwraps all its dependencies into a package so that the application runs quickly from one environment to another. 

Continuous Integration and Iterative Development 

Unlike traditional Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), DevOps model enables fast delivery with shorter development cycles. Also, with continuous integration practice, consistent development of new features can be done in the form of regular increments. Basically, adopting DevOps increases the intonation of app releases, which in turn, positively influences the entire development cycle. Iterative developments are simpler, less risky, and obviously easier to navigate during testing phase.

For instance, ASTM International, world’s largest standards development organization, followed DevOps practices to run continuous integration in order to add new platforms to the ecosystem, known as Real-Time Data Exchange (RTDX). With this approach, the company decreases 4 times the amount of time they spend integrating a new platform.

Better Communication and Cooperation Amongst Teams 

DevOps enables better communication and cooperation amongst teams by fostering a “fail forward, fail fast” culture. DevOps, hence, is not just about a set of tools and practices. In fact, it’s a cultural shift which can allow communication to take place and make employees to easily collaborate and share resources. To make sure DevOps operations work well, all stakeholders must involve and work together. 

Collaborative working and visibility further make sure that technology and applications when combined can fulfil the vision of the business and purpose altogether. 

Quick Feedback Implementation

Another big reason why DevOps for business is crucial is constant inclusion of the customer feedback. DevOps is a proactive approach to change requests as opposed to the traditional management that follow a formal chain of command. As DevOps promotes continuous integration and fast delivery of the incremental changes, the mean time to detect errors get reduced. Subsequently, faster error detection paves the way for feedback inclusion between the operations and development on one hand and clients on the other hand. 

Improved Software Quality

Applying DevOps methodology can help provide a complete overview of the software development pipeline. Across all the SDLC phases, testing can be automated and well-integrated in-tandem with the development process. Even with the collaborative model, it becomes easier to spot even the slightest defect early on with each incremental change and release. This helps prevent any major bugs in the application and improves the overall software quality.

Conclusion

Having considered the meaning of DevOps and its benefits, we can admit that it would not be a choice anymore. DevOps is crucial for business success as it removes the issues associated with traditional software development practices. This cultural shift synchronizes the complex world of application/service development, testing, deployment, maintenance. And helps ensure the software quality, availability, reliability, and performance at the same time.

It is the time to bring about a change by incorporating DevOps and completely rethink the way your business operates, and do development, testing and deployment. At Icreon, we’d be more than happy to assist and implement the best DevOps practices for your software project. Consult to our DevOps experts today!