When conversations around Agile started around two decades back, few would have thought that this radically new approach towards software development would take such a long period of time to become mainstream. With Agile now the centrepiece of software development methodology the focus on rapid prototyping, frequent releases and close collaboration with various stakeholders is clearly visible.
In 2008 when Patrick Debois talked about DevOps, one of the things that he focused on was the siloed environment in which the development and infrastructure teams worked. Since then the number of companies adopting DevOps has been accelerating emerging as the next wave of innovation in software development and delivery. DevOps objective is to fully integrate development and deployment of software development. This entails the integration of development functions with their IT operations, so teams can jointly build, test, release, and maintain new applications more frequently and more efficiently.
Software platforms are increasingly becoming critical to the functioning of corporations, the recent example of GE increasing its spend on cloud and insourcing software development highlights these developments. Additionally, stakeholders in a corporation now demand delivery of products and service at a fast pace and large corporations are disrupted by new age entities. To meet these demands, corporations must adapt and innovate at a very fast pace.
From startups to large enterprises corporations are adopting DevOps practices to build a scalable and sustainable business. DevOps is much more than a technology evolution it brings about a very impacting cultural change. DevOps assists organizations in improving the communication, integration, and collaboration between the development and operations team. The biggest challenge in implementing DevOps lies in promoting cooperation between teams
Corporations leveraging DevOps accrue significant advantages; some of them are outlined below:
- Continuous Delivery and Accelerated flow of Services: With the accelerated rate of deployment, the automated framework of DevOps allows the software development teams of the company to generate applications at a very quick rate which increases the Return on Investment and allows the organization to invest more time in marketing.
- Collaborations between Teams: DevOps requires Operations and Development teams to work together which helps the organization in bringing the teams together and enhancing the business agility. With the dissolution of barriers in the company the decision making also becomes easier and better.
- Detection of Bugs: With the teams working together and in the collaborative work environment the detection of errors and bugs becomes easier. The Operations and Development teams can track faults in the system through consistent and more efficient monitoring. The checking all through the whole, progressing life-cycle makes the organization more accountable.
- DevOps Starts and Ends with People: Once the barriers between teams have been broken it becomes important for the company to clearly establish new roles and responsibilities. The raw knowledge which the employees have must be refined to get better functional results.
Corporations may be mistaken on DevOps transformation being technical, however, that is not the only case. The focus must be maintained on Business Service. There must be a mutual sense of belief between people about the technology and the process being used.During the entire transformation process, it is essential that transparency is maintained between the Development and Operations team. The company must follow a customer-centric approach, DevOps helps the organization streamline their application delivery pipeline and assists in better utilization of customer experience data.
- DevOps Brings about a fundamental change in the process: Through DevOps and the collaboration of the two teams, handoffs between silos get improved drastically. With a proper structuring and improvement of the flow of code, the constraints and bottlenecks in the process can be easily identified and removed.
To Conclude
By implementing DevOps a corporation can accrue significant advantage when it comes to productivity and time to market. But its implementation is not only about deploying new tools like Jira and Jenkins or for that matter IT methodologies. DevOps must be treated as a corporation wide transformation exercise
