In many ways, DevOps and the cloud truly are the proverbial “perfect match.” They’re two forces that combine to help organizations embark upon a powerful digital transformation in a hyper-competitive marketplace.
As discussed in the first installment of our DevOps 101 series, DevOps isn’t a technology but a new way of managing technology, in this case, the cloud. DevOps focuses on automating processes and process improvements, while the cloud provides technology and services easily accessible by APIs.
They are not mutually exclusive. Together, they work to improve an organization’s competitive advantage through the digital transformation journey. Let’s see how that happens.
How DevOps and the Cloud Work Together
Chances are, if you search for, “DevOps and the cloud,” you’ll see mentions of these two entities as being symbiotic. It’s an appropriate description.
By its own nature, the cloud is an ideal environment for DevOps to flourish. DevOps inherits practices from agile development frameworks, incorporates operations and automates more processes. The cloud was built to support agile thanks to its flexible infrastructure and ability to operate everything via code.
Because DevOps centers on giving developers the ability to react to things in real-time, it works well in the cloud to make this happen.
It also provides the added benefit of keeping resource usage in check by only provisioning the capacity you need to meet the current demand. Scaling up and down has become much easier with the capabilities the cloud provides. That’s a plus in today’s pay-as-you-go cloud platforms.
DevOps allows developers to shorten time to market by automating many of the legacy release bottlenecks. The cloud makes it easier for them to do this by quickly creating secure test environments.
These environments allow them to prototype different software solutions without needing physical hardware to do it. Testing environments can even simulate real-world ones for more accurate results.
Seeing that DevOps focuses on eliminating, or at least reducing, latency in software development, it’s safe to say the cloud once again offers an excellent partnership.
The end result of this marriage? Organizations need less time to try innovations. If they fail, they can fail fast and go back to find a new way to succeed. And once they do succeed, they can get products to market faster.
Complementing DevOps’ process focus, the cloud delivers the perfect platform for organizations to use DevOps to provide continuously reliable, innovative software development and application modernization on cloud infrastructure.
DevOps does its part by stimulating streamlined application development and modernization and reducing resource usage thanks to faster development and to-market times. This pairing ensures that the hardware and software work together to get the job done efficiently.
Transforming through DevOps and the Cloud
While some people think the cloud is driving the increased popularity of DevOps, it’s really the opposite. DevOps makes transitioning to the cloud easier because it automates app modernization and facilitates Infrastructure as Code, allowing things to happen quickly.
This means that organizations can have their legacy apps up and running faster after migration and optimized and modernized for ongoing, high performance in the cloud. It’s an attractive proposition, to say the least.
Together, DevOps and the cloud are a powerful workhorse. Each has its own advantages when it comes to efficiency, productivity, collaboration and business impact. Combined, they can drive meaningful digital transformation that’s faster, smarter and more effective.
