Gone are those days when DevOps used to be just a set of processes that integrate both development and operations teams to complete software development. Yet, the results yielded by DevOps are hard to ignore.
In today’s rapidly developing environment, existing applications need to be constantly upgraded at an increasing pace. This has led to rise in complications between development and operations teams. Fortunately, DevOps pragmatic approach resolves these concerns and allows organizations to build and improve products at a faster rate than the traditional software development approaches.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a favourable environment where collaboration between software development and IT operations takes place. It is a culture aimed at developing strong working relationships and foster adoption of common objectives to deliver IT services that can add value to the business. DevOps is associated with a set of techniques known as continuous delivery, which is a blend of concepts from continuous integration, lean production, and constant deployment.
DevOps is all about: Continuous Development + Continuous Testing + Continuous Integration + Continuous Implementation + Continuous Monitoring.
In the DevOps lifecycle, one can go from the planning stage to the monitoring stage and then start a new cycle. It is a never ending cycle and includes various merging points.
In the traditional waterfall model, the software requirements were clear and well defined in advance. This helped the developers to programme the software after which the operational teams handled its implementation on the business systems. But, the IT world is changing immensely. So does the software requirements and software need to upgrade at an ever increasing rate. Plus, add new features, fix bugs at a quicker rate. This led to the development of the Agile Development Model. However, the developer team needn’t be the one to react quickly; the operational team which will deploy and monitor new applications should react in the same manner. This leads to the agile DevOps Approach. DevOps consulting service is more about the closer collaboration between the developers, product creators, the operational team that manages the release, deployment, monitoring and operations of the software.
Top Reasons why DevOps is Important
In the DevOps process, a cross functional development team works together with an operational team to build an iteration of software products. The outcome of this imminent collaboration between the operations and development team leads to faster release of products, higher software quality and improved product security. For instance, the environments that leverages DevOps practices experience the following:
- 420x faster lead time from development to deployment of product
- 4x times lower change failure rate
- 40x higher frequent code deployments
- 90x faster restoration services if an unplanned outage occurs
With benefits like these, it is no longer a surprise that many organizations are planning to include DevOps into their IT and software development strategies. Here are a few reasons why DevOps is critical for the development of a business.
Shorter Development Cycles and Faster Innovation: If the development and operations teams are in different locations or silos, it becomes difficult for the mobile applications development to get ready in time and the timeline gets stretched. Once the dev team hand overs the applications, the operation team’s cycle times are extended without cause.
But in a combined team of development and operations, the application gets ready for use much quickly. This helps companies to innovate faster as compared to their competitors. Having shorter development cycles translates to bringing an application 50x faster than with the traditional practices.
Better Collaboration and Communication: DevOps helps in enhancing the software development culture. Combined teams are more focused on performance rather than individual goals- when a team trust each other, they can experiment on new products and innovate effectively. The teams focus on bringing the product into the market and their KPIs get structured accordingly.
None of the team wait for turning over the applications to see the end results. The entire process becomes increasingly seamless as all the individuals involved in the process work towards attainment of the common goal.
Agile Approach: The operations team plays an important role between the front end and development end of the product building. One of the challenging roles is the liaison between product development and customer advocacy. Developers interact minimally with the customer, as a result of which the products in development often do not match up with the requirements of the customers.
The answer to this woe is the DevOps Agile approach. DevOps closes this gap between customers and developers. Using a strong blend of DevOps culture and workflow., both the development and operations team address the emerging customer demands and respond with a rapid development and deployment of the solutions. With the right tools in place, team quickly goes from idea creation stage to deploying a solution to address the changing needs of the customers as smoothly as possible, without jeopardizing the entire development process.
Stable Deployments: The operations team has a stronger understanding of how things are moving forward in the development process of a product, databases and the system architecture when they work simultaneously with the dev team before finalizing the product. This implies that with DevOps, issues are less likely to occur and if they do, all the team members are better equipped with the right tools and best practices to address and fix them faster. What’s more, there is a proper communication channel in place to help the teams averts such issues in the future releases.
Low Implementation Failure, and Recovery Time: The main reasons for the team failures during the implementation process is due to the programming errors. With lesser development cycles, DevOps encourages rapid code versions. This in return, makes it easier for detecting the code defects and the team can use their time to decrease the implementation failure numbers using various agile programming practices that need standard programming and better collaboration.
Recovery time is an important part because sometimes you expect some kind of failure. However, the recovery is much faster when both the development and operations teams’ work together to share ideas and make it into a reality.
Higher Competencies: Great efficiency helps to accelerate the development procedure and make it less prone to programming errors. There are methods to automate the DevOps tasks. Continuous integration servers systematize code testing procedure, minimizing the amount of manual work required and thus, helping the software engineers to focus on completing the tasks that can’t be automated. Few speeding up tools like scalable infrastructure of cloud-based platforms helps to improve the team’s access to hardware resources. As a result, the deployment and testing process gets accelerated. Acceleration tools can be used to gather codes more rapidly and parallel workflows are integrated into the continuous delivery chain to advert delays and one team gets more time to complete the unfinished tasks.
Shifting gears to the agile DevOps approach would be of greater benefits to organizations as it creates a more efficient and effective environment for their clients and employees. The importance of DevOps is slowly catching up with today’s organizational setup, and those who have not implemented it are now adopting DevOps methods for achieving higher operational efficiency and delivering a better customer experience.
