DevOps: Plan smarter, collaborate better and deliver faster

Modern market is a thing full of twists and turns at every corner, that requires flexibility and ability to adapt to the ever-changing state of things. “Agility” is the word that best describes what it takes to be competitive in the modern world.

Your organization simply won’t get anywhere if you aren’t ready to adjust according to the situation and bend it to your benefit. It is true for most industries, but especially so in software development. In order to be the best at what an organization can achieve, there are tons of things, which need to come to the fore. The higher the networking capability between the employees, the greater the efficiency of the apps and tools used within the organization. Many have asked how their transformations could be taken further.

By adopting DevOps practices, agile organizations can further enhance the efficiency, agility, and quality of their development sprints. That bring us to the question, what exactly is DevOps? In addition, how important is it for your company?

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.

The Necessity of the DevOps approach

The world of IT is changing fast. Requirements change very often, and software must be developed at an ever increasing pace. Not only must software and web applications be marketed faster, but it must also be possible to constantly update them, easily add new features and fix any bugs found. This leads to the Agile Development model.

However, the team of developers should not be the only ones to react quickly and efficiently. The operational team, which has to deploy and monitor the new applications, should also react the same way. This leads to the DevOps approach.

The Motivation behind the practices:

The traditional silos between developers, testers, release managers and system administrators are broken down. They work more closely together during the entire development and deployment process, which enables them to understand each other’s challenges and questions better.

The DevOps approach thus requires people with multidisciplinary skills – not only people who are comfortable with both the infrastructure and configuration, but also those who are capable of performing tests and debugging software. DevOps is a bridge builder; it is for those who are skilled in every field.

Some of the common motivating factors are:

1. Extremely high deployment time sometimes as much as 24 hours or even more
2. Enormous Application Downtime
3. Extended wait time for smaller fixes
4. Tedious process of replicating environment
5. Automating and streamlining software development
6. Automating infrastructure management processes
7. Automating monitoring and analysis
8. Very frequent but small updates
9. Considerable reduction in time to market
10. Micro-services architecture to make applications more flexible and enable quicker innovation

DevOps may be essentially disruptive, but it is here to stay because it is very practical and can be a valuable asset for organizations. Let us look at some of the benefits DevOps provide:

1. Rapid Time-to-Market

Improved business agility is one of the fundamental gains of implementing DevOps. Reducing the time between development and launch phases will enable your business to generate competitive advantage – by rolling out new features to customers at much higher frequencies – and drastically lower the time it takes to respond to failures.

2. Improved collaboration between teams

In the past there were no links between developers and operations, innovation was carried out in seclusion, making things all the more elusive and secretive. However, as times have changed, so have the methods of performing innovation. DevOps not only brings key concepts and tools to create automated workflows for a system’s development life cycle (SDLC); it also allows integration of team collaboration tools to these workflows.

3. Security

While DevOps does not require the use of any specific type of tool, DevOps teams tend to favor next-generation architectures and technologies, like micro-services and containers. These help to make apps more secure by reducing attack surfaces and enabling quicker reaction. If you deploy your app using containerized micro-services, it becomes harder for attackers to compromise your entire app, because an attack against one micro-service does not give them control over the other ones.

4. Quicker Deployment

If your business has successfully launched DevOps, it is getting ready for the next level of deployment. Through the right approaches, an organization can benefit by deploying their new systems in a more enhanced, efficient manner, while keeping the efficiency intact. This way, innovation and continual deployment becomes synonymous with each other, thereby making the deployment easier and quicker.

The above-mentioned benefits are some of the most important ones out of the many that DevOps has to offer. With so many benefits being achieved through DevOps, there is no denying the fact that DevOps is the future of the production cycles.

After reading all this you must surely be thinking – How to get started?

Developing a DevOps culture requires planning. These tips can help you develop a DevOps mindset:

1. Think about how you want your web team to operate over a period of 12-18 months.
2. Examine your current work processes and ask yourself (and your team!) what can be improved, and what the risks are.
3. Encourage your teams to have their say: How do they think that the processes could be realistically improved?
4. Feel free to share your conclusions and your plans with other units: cross-functional teams can be involved in your entire organization to improve efficiency!

Don’t worry, we at Nitor Infotech can get you started by offering you our DevOps assessment tool. The tool would primarily assess your maturity in terms of DevOps processes, your key pain areas and then come up with few recommendations, which could make a lot of difference in how your projects work. Nitor Infotech can assist you in all ways possible to achieve a mature and robust DevOps Model.

To know more about Nitor Infotech and DevOps services email us.