Jun 30th, 2020
Why Devops Can Transform Your Software Business
The DevOps approach to software development draws upon the philosophies of agility, product mindset, and cross-functional collaboration. In a DevOps mindset, development and operations teams are no longer separate. Engineers work across the entire lifecycle of the application, and QA, security, performance, and design are integrated more tightly into the development process from the beginning.
Why Is DevOps Important?
Put simply, DevOps is about breaking down the barrier between two traditionally siloed teams: development and operations. By adopting a cultural mindset that favors collaboration between these teams, as well as a reliance on automation of processes that are historically slow and manual, organizations can deliver more reliable software, faster.
Effectively implementing a DevOps mindset requires an understanding of the tools and practices available to do so. Automation, continuous integration and deployment, building apps as microservices, and improving monitoring and logging are crucial components of an effective DevOps strategy.
Services like AWS and Azure, and platforms like GitHub and CircleCI provide some of the tools needed to transform an organization into a DevOps-oriented business.
Key Benefits of a DevOps Mindset
To get the most out of DevOps, it’s important to understand the benefits of adopting the DevOps mindset. Here are some of the ways that adopting a DevOps mindset improves the speed of delivery, scalability, security, stability, and recovery of your software.
Retain Stability While Introducing New Features
Practices like continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) allow engineers to make small, easily testable changes to the codebase. These frequently delivered (and frequently tested) changes ensure the delivery of safe and functional code every time. Automated testing and monitoring are key in retaining stability.
Accelerate Delivery
CI and CD not only ensure better-tested code: they increase the speed at which new features and bug fixes can be delivered. A microservices architecture, in which data concerns are decoupled from UI concerns and large applications are split into smaller, manageable pieces, allows teams to act more quickly when deploying changes to their part of the codebase.
Scale Better, Faster
Automated testing and deployment provides increased opportunity to scale. Infrastructure as code, a practice in which software development practices like version control and CI are applied to the operations and infrastructure of a platform, means that new instances can be spun up or taken down easily.
Improve Recovery Time
Improved and automated logging combined with incremental releases means that when a problem does occur, it’s easy to isolate and fix. Recovery times under a DevOps development model have been shown to be up to 24x faster than a traditional development model, while change failure rates have been shown to be 3x lower.
Improve Security
Increasing delivery speed doesn’t have to mean sacrificing security. Implementing a policy as code approach, similar to the infrastructure as code approach, means that teams can actually improve a lot of security measures through the use of automated policy compliance and configuration management techniques. These techniques ensure policy compliance at scale.
Improve Collaboration
A DevOps cultural model helps you build better, more communicative teams. The values of accountability and ownership within Devops developers are strongly emphasized, while shared responsibility and combined workflows are necessary to deliver solutions. The time it takes to hand over code from developers to operations engineers decreases, and teams are acutely aware of the impact of their changes upon the entire operation.
Conclusion
Implementing a Devops model will improve the overall process of software development making your software product or platform more stable, secure and feature-rich which can make the organization more competitive. If you do not have the Devops expertise in your team currently, there are plenty of good companies providing Devops Development Services and Devops Consulting Services that you can hire to get a jump start.
