DevOps is an innovation-driven software development philosophy that focuses on extreme collaboration. The name is a contraction of Development and Operations, two central teams that represent the core of any organization’s IT department.
Understanding the DevOps Approach
According to the DevOps philosophy, a better collaboration of associated tools and processes leads to sustained innovation. Consequently, the organization is able to gain a competitive edge by delivering more value to customers.
Initially, this approach was used by leaner startups but has now gained the status of an essential capability for any enterprise. Any solution that leverages the power of the cloud, social media, and mobile can benefit from a DevOps approach. As a result, large enterprises as well as small businesses are adding more DevOps certified resources to their development teams and are initiating formal yet the best DevOps training programs. An IBM whitepaper, DevOps: The IBM approach, sums up the benefits of this paradigm in a concise way by describing it as an enabler of continuous innovation, continuous delivery and continuous learning for any organization.
Importance of DevOps
DevOps acts as a framework for delivering business solutions. Its main goal is to increase the efficiency of every process and maximize collaboration across teams. The approach has quickly gained value and acceptance throughout the world because it also focuses on engaging end-users for feedback. The following five points highlight the importance of using the DevOps approach.
An End-to-End Comprehensive Approach
The DevOps paradigm is based on quickly deploying smaller increments of code and generating feedback. This helps discover potential problems that exist within the system and also identifies improvements. The stakeholders involved in system development, such as project managers, quality engineers, development and operations team, all play a role in the DevOps approach. As an end-to-end approach, it’s based on four core principles:
- Close collaboration among all stakeholders and project team members
- Viewing Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- DevOps Continuous Integration/Continuous Development and automation of core development tasks (such as deployment, testing and any other process prone to human error)
- Using metrics to measure priorities, policies, and project direction.
High-Velocity Digital Innovation
Velocity is a metric used in agile software development to track the amount of work done. It measures the units of work done in a specific interval, both these components of the metrics vary across organizations. Amazon, for example, was deploying new code every 11.6 seconds back in 2013. This measure jumped to a deployment every second (50 million deployments per year) in 2015. The goal of sustained digital innovation often depends on velocity. This is where DevOps can become a transformative force. The increased focus on collaboration enables the software development pipeline to function at higher velocity rates. Your team can work on prioritizing and optimizing key deliverables and become capable of continuous delivery.
Smoother Transition from Business Idea to Capability
Innovation often starts out as a simple idea. Such ideas hold a lot of promise for the business, however, the process of nurturing ideas so that they evolve into marketable capabilities is far from simple. An innovation-driven product lifecycle is not easy to implement in the complex world of software development. This is where DevOps enters the foray to help businesses implement a solution delivery lifecycle that puts innovation front and center. Agility and innovation can help organizations streamline processes such that simple ideas quickly transition to essential capabilities. Traditional approaches to development were bogged down by silos and friction. DevOps removes these barriers and also focuses on capability enhancement by creating customer feedback loops to improve solutions. Another factor that allows smoother transition is the use of precise criteria to mark changes as approved and/or permitted.
Adopt a Lean-Thinking and Agile Approach
The basic goal of DevOps is to enable organizations to function as lean and agile IT development pipelines. In the pursuit of this, DevOps recommends the following actions:
- Get rid of any process or activity within a process that doesn’t help you understand what your customer wants.
- Develop processes that integrate customer feedback and can work as quick continuous iterations.
- Eliminate any manual processes that are causing delay or incurring unnecessary wait times.
- Encourage domain experts, business analysts, developers, and testers to focus more on creative tasks and eliminate unnecessary procedure-centric tasks.
- Try to reduce uncertainty by using meaningful metrics as a measurement tool.
- Define delivery analytics and create benchmarks for your current processes and the refined DevOps processes as well.
- Monitor progress and ensure that progress metrics are accessible to all teams/departments.
Some of these objectives do present a challenge to organizations that are following the traditional approach to software product development. Resistance to change is expected when adopting a new methodology, however, the advantages of DevOps make it well worth the effort.
More Transparency and Better Collaboration
Collaboration is the core pillar of DevOps, which helps create a culture of innovation and transparency. Close cooperation between the IT operations and development teams has a snowball effect on other teams as well. The insights generated by the DevOps approach can help sales, marketing, and customer support teams to develop improved strategies and refine tactics. This ultimately helps your business deliver a better customer experience and generate more revenue.
This collaborative approach works in reverse as well, the insights gained by delivering great customer experiences will help engineering teams refine product goals. It helps identify which product features are required, which must be prioritized, and what improvements can be made.
Businesses regardless of their size can take advantage of faster innovation by using DevOps. The prized objectives of implementing continuous integration and continuous deployment can be achieved by incorporating DevOps into development practices. If you are interested in learning more about DevOps you can explore online resources or simply click here to talk to experts.