Gone are the days when businesses used to focus on just the development and release of a product. To stay ahead in the competition, businesses have started taking up the agile approach in order to adapt to the latest trends, new developments, and most importantly, the demands of time-to-market features.
As the IT world continues to grow and evolve, the two most important things that have come to light are flexibility and speed in software processing. This has led to a great switch in the IT delivery system, the most popular one being DevOps.
DevOps, or Development Operations, has brought a cultural shift in the field of IT. It focuses on making development and operations teams work hand-in-hand to minimize time-to-market. DevOps consulting companies have also picked up fame due to the current state of DevOps-less companies. Here are a few tips to speed up time-to-market. Read on!
How Does DevOps Accelerate Time-to-Market?
1. A magic button
DevOps helps in encouraging development teams to invest more time in delivering quality work. Developers don’t have to spend their time figuring out code integration and machine configuration if the companies adopt automated testing and integration as both the tasks can easily be done by accessing a button on the self-service portal.
There are various European banks that have integrated DevOps in their software process. This has led banks to improve their efficiency by 25%. Also, it cuts down the workload of the IT operations teams, enabling them to work on more important and challenging tasks that could add more value to the organization.
2. Fast and furious
The development teams connect with IT operations when they build software to send it for testing. There are two major scenarios: Either the operations team create a different testing environment if the product is completely new, or add side apps and interfaces and configure them if the product is an updated version of the existing product. After the operations team is done with all the tests, the development team deploys code to the software. This entire process becomes lengthy and time-consuming.
In cases like these, DevOps teams hop in furiously at the sad state of affairs. Take automated testing for instance. With the help of it, web app developers can get instant feedback, along with automated integration enabling them to edit the codebase faster. As a result, companies can release updated pieces of software as they deliver new features to market quicker.
3. Hidden no more. Healing is living.
In the majority of the cases, once the product/software is released to the market, the developers move on and start working on the next project. They barely worry about the precautions for future problems, leaving it all up to the operations team. Implementing DevOps ensures that the developers, too, are involved in the entire process of the software product, keeping an eye on any kind of updates and new features. This results in enhanced quality of code.
With DevOps, developers work on smaller code pieces and track bugs instantly when a failure occurs in the product. Human errors are no more hidden because automation helps expose what otherwise was not easy, with what DevOps brings to the software life-cycle. What’s the benefit? Faster delivery of bug fixes.
The no-nonsense, not fake, real success stories of DevOps implementations:
Several well-known companies use DevOps in their processes. Here are a few examples:
Being a third platform company that leverages mobile, social, cloud, and analytics, Airbnb had to adopt DevOps in order to release quick and efficient small deployments.
When Sony Pictures Entertainment’s Digital Media Group (DGM) faced delay between the finishing the software development and delivery, they implemented a continuous delivery model which reduced the delivery time. Because of this, their development team could focus on putting in new features that led to lower costs.
Because of a lot of silos due to uncollaborative teams, Etsy faced the problem of slow deployments. With two deployments per week to fifty per day, Etsy’s decision to adopt DevOps was a huge success for them.
When Netflix hit the markets, they did not have any commercial tools to help its cloud infrastructure to run smoothly. What did they do? They sought help from open source solutions. Netflix created the Simian Army along with the volunteers. The purpose of the Simian Army was to provide a set of automated tools that could help in automating tests and enabling a proactive approach to resolve issues.
Convinced? It doesn’t matter (honestly) what we agree or disagree upon. DevOps is something that was born out of necessity. It can be upgraded, but cannot be replaced. It is merely a product of the need for speed.
Hope this article helps you better grasp what DevOps is.
References: DevOps, Softweb Solutions
Ajeet Singh
