Ever wondered how Facebook can service so many users simultaneously? Or maybe you’ve wondered why all the apps on your smartphone require updates so frequently. The answer to both of these questions is DevOps.

DevOps answers an array of questions in regards to how organisations can scale seamlessly, optimise costs and increase their cybersecurity – so let’s break this down. DevOps is often misunderstood, flying under the radar in terms of its importance in the world of cloud computing.

“DevOps is not a goal, but a never-ending process of continual improvement.” —Jez Humble, Founder and CTO, DevOps Research and Assessment

Fundamentally, DevOps is a set of tools, practices and an overarching cultural philosophy that promotes the integration of a range of teams including development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security.

Nowadays, the overarching concept of DevOps comprises any process involved in optimising the management of the resources that power and deploy your application or software. This could involve migrating to the cloud to increase scalability or completing an AWS Well-Archictected Review to reduce overhead costs.

The biggest drawcard of DevOps is its function as a long-term solution, as opposed to a quick fix. Frequently software applications are pushed out at speed to meet customer demands, but often lose functionality as the customer base grows and their requirements grow. DevOps is heavily entrenched in the notion of removing a customer’s technical debt and increasing their unlimited ability to scale.

What are the Benefits?

Implementing DevOps procedures allows organisations to deliver applications and services at high velocity. DevOps benefits every stage of the consumer lifecycle process – assisting organisations to release product updates quicker through automation, communicate more effectively with customers and compete more effectively in the market.

DevOps isn’t something that’s implemented widely throughout the tech industry as yet, hence why it’s often an easier option to outsource. Those organisations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes lose out on a wealth of benefits. Six of the most noteworthy benefits involved in DevOps include:

• Accelerated Time to Market: DevOps improves an organisation’s ability to innovate and improve quicker, increasing the frequency and pace of releases. The DORA 2019 State of DevOps Report found that elite teams deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams.

• Increased Team Communication: Arguably one of the main benefits of DevOps is its’ ability to improve cross-departmental communication, ultimately allowing increased efficiency between teams.

• Improved Security: By integrating security practices within the DevOps process, fast and safe delivery of code is ensured. This concept, referred to as DevSecOps, involves ongoing security audits and testing into workflows to integrate the goal of delivering secure code with the process of speed in delivery.

• Maintenance of System Reliability: By integrating DevOps processes into your workflow, teams are kept informed of application performance in real-time. This allows quicker bug fixes and updates, increasing the reliability of products and ultimately resulting in improved customer experience and increased competitive advantage.

• Automation: The ability to automate recurring processes with DevOps means that high-performing organisations spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework (according to Puppet’s 2016 ‘State of DevOps’ Report).

• Enhanced Team Productivity: Due to the aforementioned ability to automate time-consuming processes and improve communication amongst previously siloed teams, productivity is significantly increased.

How Does it Work?

The DevOps Lifecycle comprises a range of steps and can be visualised as an infinite loop – an ongoing process aiming at continually improving upon successful product delivery. Each organisation’s DevOps models will range in combinations of key components throughout the delivery pipeline and feedback loop.

DevOps is necessary to build superior quality software – embracing scalability, agility and continuous innovation to constantly evolve product offerings. Through the guiding philosophies of consistent feedback, experimentation and learning, the entirety of the process exists to streamline, automate and innovate organisational development.

You can view it as a broad toolkit designed to streamline processes and promote operational efficiency. This is achieved through incorporating a range of concepts designed to promote the notion of ongoing improvement and continuous testing. The feedback aspect of the DevOps model is essential to ascertain and analyse the outcome of any application and allows for key insight into ways in which to improve. Based on stakeholder feedback, updates and improvements can easily be actioned to make way for updated software and increased customer satisfaction (and a software update for the app on your smartphone).

Implementing with AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a market leader in DevOps services, constantly improving the ways in which developers can execute services to provision and configure cloud environments. AWS’ range of DevOps tools helps teams rapidly and reliably deploy and innovate for their customers through the power of automation and control.

Whether it be setting cloud foundations or migrating whole workloads into the cloud, AWS’ range of DevOps tools streamlines their customer’s cloud journey by automating manual tasks and helping teams manage complex environments at scale – allowing engineers to stay in control of the high velocity that is enabled by DevOps.

Outsourcing DevOps allows for the ability for specific documentation to be created which advises customers on how to utilise and leverage AWS on an ongoing basis.

Conclusion

So, if your mind isn’t already made up – DevOps is undoubtedly a necessity for successful Application Development, although DevOps continues to exist as an addition to application management as opposed to a requirement. Awareness continues to grow of the compelling use cases for DevOps implementation, as does its adoption.

Implementing the range of methodologies, principles and strategies may seem overwhelming, though the results speak for themselves. Reach out to our team today for your Free Discovery Call to find out how we can help you with DevOps execution: experience.digital/contact-us