Speed. Improvement. More. Now. These days, market demand is unrelenting. Too often, organizations find themselves struggling to keep up, be productive, meet production goals and deliver exceptional customer value in the app development cycle.
At times you might feel challenged by all of this. That’s where DevOps comes in. As we have previously discussed in our DevOps 101 blog series, the practice of DevOps blends the philosophies, the people, the technologies and cultures of two different digital areas, software development (the Dev) and IT operations (the Ops) to streamline and improve the way you work and manage your technology from planning to production and delivery.
With greater demands for better, faster software development and delivery, traditional software development and infrastructure practices are too siloed to keep up with this need for speed.
Combining DevOps and the cloud keeps developers rapidly developing and the operations teams productively deploying, all while working in tandem with each other. DevOps also solves a variety of challenges in the process.
What Problems Does DevOps Solve?
Let’s take a look at some common stumbling blocks organizations often encounter in the app development and modernization process and how DevOps can solve them.
Time to Market
DevOps focuses on eliminating or at least reducing latency in software development. This means developers are able to shorten time to market by automating many of the bottlenecks common with legacy applications. One of the reasons this occurs is that DevOps helps organizations create the right environment for app development and modernization.
In a non-DevOps environment, the developers develop the apps with little, if any, coordination with the operations team, which manages the production environment. Once an app is developed, the ops team will then prep the environment for the release. If the app doesn’t work in that production environment, both teams go back to their silos and try again in the same manner. Often, there’s a lot of waiting and frustration on both sides.
When both teams work closely together in a DevOps environment, development and production are aligned. This speeds time to market and streamlines the entire process. If an app’s code successfully goes into production, great! The DevOps team can get moving on to the next one. If not, they can troubleshoot together and quickly devise a fix for what went wrong.
Productivity
Without DevOps practices in place, development teams have to wait for the operations teams to create the right production environment. As mentioned in the “Time to Market “ section above, this can slow the entire process and affect overall productivity. It’s a slow/low situation. Lead time for code tweaks is slow, and deployment frequency is low. No one wants that!
Employing the DevOps philosophy allows your development and operations teams to work together to integrate automation for testing and change requests. Neither of the traditionally siloed teams is sitting around waiting for the other to do their part of the job. With DevOps, it’s a continuous, collaborative process.
App Quality
Better inter-departmental communication, combined with continuous automated testing, means you are producing higher quality apps at a faster pace. A DevOps approach leaves more time for your team to innovate.
