By: Karl Rubin, COO
The world has been built on bridges and not on barriers. Anything that separates anything is bound to inject delays, confusion, and conflicts – eventually. That is why DevOps has been such an enormous source of excitement for developers and businesses alike worldwide. It has completely redefined how applications are made, delivered, and used.
DevOps and its Benefits
DevOps is a combination of new-age approaches, tools, and practices that injects velocity into application development by bringing together development and operations. When software development and IT operations are dissolved and handled as a single entity, it changes the entire gamut of application development. There is more collaboration and less friction. A unified view of software runs in an infinite loop so that application time and gaps are minimized while agility is maximized. Thus, when DevOps shines, an organization enjoys multi-fold advantages in a new application scenario:
- Minimized manual processes and lengthy reviews
- Fewer siloes and better collaboration & communication between various teams
- Faster time-to-market for software
- Less downtime and defects
- Rapid improvement across builds, validations, and deployment
- Automation-led savings in costs and less wastage of efforts
- Higher responsibility and code ownership in the development
Getting Started with Organization’s DevOps Journey
The entire DevOps journey hinges a lot on injecting collaboration and removing barriers across the application life cycle. It can be done through a broad range of steps – such as iterative software development, automation and programmable infrastructure deployment, maintenance, building trust and cohesion, and implementing agile IT tools and best practices. Also, an organization would need to embrace task automation, continuous testing, continuous integration, as well as continuous delivery. There would be a new role for real-time monitoring tools, incident management, cloud computing capabilities, containers, configuration management, and collaboration platforms.
Common Misconceptions, Mistakes, and Challenges
Organizations can miss out on areas that need proper attention and investment – this has to be done before the gains of DevOps can be realized. They are usually around:
- Resistance to organizational and IT departmental changes
- Scarcity of new skills and job roles
- Cost of training and support
- Inability to move from Traditional Infrastructure to Microservices
- Wasted or unnecessary or insecure automation
- The hurry to scale DevOps across multiple projects and teams
Ways to Overcome Challenges and Obstacles
If an organization can start defining common goals and improve collaboration between disparate teams, it can wipe away many obstacles in its DevOps journey. Having one automated system for both development and operations would help significantly. It is also essential to replace legacy processes and move towards modularity, microservices, and new-age architectures – try to minimize complexity and the number of platforms as well as inject visibility and transparency through better IT roadmaps. And, of course, address ‘resistance to change’ before you force people to use new tools and processes.
The Evolving DevOps Journey
The DevOps market, according to MarketsandMarkets, is growing from $2.90 B in 2017 to $10.31 B by 2023. As DevOps expands boundaries, an influx of new waves and inflection points, like AIOps, accelerates automation, and minimizes wait times even further through intelligent automation. Like DevSecOps, that organically blends insecurity in the DevOps fabric. Like BizDevOps that connect executives, application owners, and other business stakeholders to the technical team. The rise of Microservices Architecture adds speed to deployments and helps teams to add additional features quickly. There is also an influx of agile frameworks and cloud technologies and the impact of IoT in the realm of DevOps.
When you have the right DevOps strategy, you can wholly embrace the agile application delivery paradigm. You can get changes into production or the hands of users safely, quickly, and in a sustainable as well as predictable way. This can be done with solutions covering the entire spectrum of navigating, test driving, accelerating, and managing DevOps. If you can apply a GPS-like roadmap to this journey, you will arrive at the winning spot faster than your competition. Choose a solution with a similar mindset and help you with proof-of-concept and DevOps delivery services comprehensively. Start with strategy, accelerate to POCs, and arrive well at delivery. See you at the final milestone.
