Blog

Today, digitization is creating an exceptional demand for companies that are looking to experiment, innovate and deliver results faster. Escalating agility and speed is not just a desire, but a necessity for the survival of many industries. In the current scenario, it’s imperative for companies to adopt new methods of working in order to be ahead of the competition. For this to be possible, it’s mandatory to embrace an efficient and flexible approach to software delivery that removes the traditional barriers between development, quality assurance, and operations so as to deliver much faster turn-around times. One such unique approach is ‘DevOps’.

DevOps (Development and Operations) is a set of principles that unifies the development and operation teams in an organization to make the software delivery process lean and efficient. It plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between developers and operations. In the past few years, this practice has gained steam among various organizations worldwide. If implemented correctly, it has the tendency to not only revamp the software process but also create value for both customers and employees by enhancing business productivity. In this blog post, we will describe some important reasons to use DevOps in your organization and some key recommendations for its successful implementation.

Reasons to implement DevOps in your organization

DevOps implementation helps to deliver high-quality and reliable software enhancing the culture of collaboration and cooperation among all employees in an organization. Below are some major reasons for implementing DevOps practices in your organization:

• Shorter recovery time: DevOps promotes frequent code versions with shorter development cycles, which makes it easy to identify code defects. In software development, recovery time is a critical issue which arises during software failure. But DevOps implementation reduces recovery time because development and operations team work together to share ideas and methodologies to solve technical issues.

• Boost Innovation: In this competitive world, the growth of an organization largely depends on its ability to innovate faster than the competition. Since changesets are small and problems tend to be less complex in a DevOps integrated environment, every team has enough time to do thorough R&D, which encourages innovative thinking. It helps a DevOps development engineer to develop and deploy applications quickly.
   
• Enhance job satisfaction: Rather than a power-based or rule-based culture, DevOps software development promotes a performance-based company environment, which reduces corporate obstacles. It results in a more productive workforce which boosts business performance. Also, employees gain a better understanding of where their role fits in the company and how they can become more valuable.
   
• Improved customer experience: When a business generates faster proprietary solutions, it is better able to serve business clients. DevOps can also help to improve customer service for your business. As per the recent studies based on its benefits for businesses, around 70 percent of businessmen reported improved customer experience since implementing the DevOps program in their organization.

How to implement DevOps in your organization?

1. Identify your business needs: Before implementing DevOps practices, you need to align your IT goals with specific business objectives. It is recommended to spend some time to understand its applications so that you can make a business-driven implementation. It should not be implemented just because it is the latest trend around, but the development process for your business needs should demand this change. 

2. Break the functional silos: After deciding on implementing DevOps, break down your organizational silos among various IT disciplines. The ideology behind this vast technology is that the operations, development and other functions must work closely by collaborating and cooperating with each other. Breaking down your functional silos will improve the communication among various teams and help in better decision making.

3. Build a continuous delivery, continuous integration platform: DevOps implementation is not possible without continuous delivery and continuous integration. Continuous integration is a software development practice where coders regularly merge their code changes into a central repository after which automated builds and tests are run. Continuous delivery is the process to build, test, configure and deploy from a build to a production environment. It has become a mandatory requirement for organizations as in order to deliver value to your customers, you must release continually and without errors. For this, it’s necessary to build a continuous delivery and continuous integration platform.  

4. Create a Continuous testing environment: Continuous testing best practices include automated testing procedures, separate test suits, and better QA practices. With DevOps, testing will become an integral part of the development process and performed continually throughout the delivery pipeline. Embracing it without creating a continuous testing environment will be inefficient and unsuccessful for your business. So, in order to use DevOps to its full potential, it is obligatory to create a continuous testing environment.

5. Create a Continuous Deployment System: Continuous delivery can’t be successful without continuous deployment. It goes one step ahead of continuous delivery. With continuous deployment, every build that passes the necessary stages of your production pipeline is delivered to your customers. The continuous deployment will be augmented by continuous monitoring and feedback. It will help developers to know what features are useful to end-users.

6. Monitor the performance continuously- In aDevOps development company, performance monitoring is the key. You may have many services and procedures running inside your organization, but you need to monitor only the following major key metrics: Server health, vulnerabilities, deployments, development cycles, and application performance. You can use tools like SonarQube, Jenkins, Artifactory, CloudForce, TFS, etc. for performance monitoring.

Long story short, moving from traditional software development to DevOps process is challenging, as it involves a lot of changes across the organization. As per the reports from DevOps.com, the adoption rate of the technology increased from 66 percent to 74 percent from 2015 to 2016. The beauty of DevOps culture is that it helps organizations to serve their clients better and compete more effectively in the market. The primary task in its implementation is to assign the right people for the right tasks while equipping them with the right tools. But once implemented successfully, organizations could deliver their products and services at a faster pace, with limited issues and lower development cost.

If you are interested in knowing more about DevOps and looking forward to embracing it into your organization, then we’ve got you covered. Our high-end DevOps Advisory & Transformation services are focused on helping clients identify the key areas of improvement in their organization, provide recommendations & roadmap to adopt high maturity practices, and design target operating model to maximize their business investments.