DevOps – A Fad Or A Reality For Continuous Delivery & Speed To Market

You have been relying on Agile, and your engineering team meets with the product team diligently to discuss project iterations and user stories. They collaborate effectively, and what they are developing keeps getting better. Yet you are not getting your innovative products to the market before your competitors do.

You have heard about top brands like Google, Flickr and Etsy deliver consistently and supports dynamic business needs. How are they doing it?

They have taken a new method to get there – DevOps, an extension of agile software development born from the need to support increased software velocity. It covers all the activities required for timely delivery: i.e. development, testing, deployment, maintenance & scaling. Speaking of continuous delivery, DevOps is the ideal strategy, which has proven successful across the world.

As such, the investment into DevOps increases continuously and its market is estimated to reach $24 billion by 2023 –according to a report, Cowen & Co.

While many companies have already been converted in DevOps culture, some full-scale enterprises and fledgling start-ups are still afraid to make this DevOps transition. They hesitate, as DevOps seems to be a fad than a reality for continuous delivery and time to market.

What is DevOps?

“DevOps is the convergence of operations with development processes and vice versa.”

Mike Nichols, a Senior DevOps Engineer at Zipari

In traditional software development, teams were working in an isolated manner. The development team was in charge of gathering requirements from the client and writing code. The testing team tests and releases the code to the operation team to deploy. The operation team isolated from the development environment deploys the code and sends it for production. In this traditional Agile, the development team builds products and lets the operation team worry about what happens to it in Production.

You might ask yourself if I’m using Agile methodology, why do I need to adopt DevOps as well?

Well, the DevOps team power up from the success of agile methodology – an incremental, iterative and evolutionary development process.

While agile make developers, designers, and testers to work together as a part of an agile team, DevOps widened the concept and included the operation team as well in the framing of the cross-functional team.

In DevOps with the collaboration between the development and delivery team, there is no intention to let the operation team succumb to chaos.  It breaks down the barriers between development and operational teams and leads the way to get benefit from combined skills.

The key benefit of adopting DevOps culture is that it eliminates the silos between development and operation team from an organization. It removes the dependency on the availability of a certain team or an individual in delivering software.  Product Efficiency is improved as all cross-teams involved in making decisions and feedback to the decisions is prompt.

Further, with automation software, the DevOps team delivers quality products as it eliminates anomalies and mistakes that humans typically make. With automated services, the ongoing operation costs also reduce.

Know more about, whether DevOps is the right fit for your organization.

DevOps and Continuous Delivery for Accelerated Time to Market

We usually hear continuous delivery (CD) connected with the term DevOps. Are DevOps and Continuous Delivery the same thing? How do they join at the hip? Most importantly, how can they accelerate the time to market?

The demand for the CD was brought on by the demand for faster time to market where agility is the way to achieve that. The concept of continuous delivery is simple the enterprise no longer does traditional one ‘Fat release’ with many user stories rolled in.

DevOps is a culture that enables businesses to produce frequent software releases with better quality. And, continuous delivery (CD) is the term of what DevOps empowers.

CD needs fast feedback, broad testing & deployment adoption and seamless handshakes between development and operational team.

DevOps makes automation awareness, which will be the key to achieve CD. Automation is needed for each stage of the SDLC including test automation along with the delivery pipeline. It ensures instant feedback to the dev and ops team, accelerating necessary revisions and changes. Explore how automation enables teams to develop, test and deploy quality applications faster.

Source: Mckinsey

DevOps is Not a Hype, But How?

DevOps is not a Fad; it will stay for a long period as it promises an accelerated time to market, quality and efficiency of the software. There are several ways in which it supports you to speed time to market for your product. The most effective ways are:

Strengthened security with resiliency

Delivering a product fast is vital for business success, but it will be futile if you ignore security just to save some time. The increased rate of cybercrime today costs businesses millions of dollars with security breaches. DevOps transition for continuous delivery offers a highly resilient and scalable system that functions well under the change and pressure. Its constant iterative improvement philosophy makes the security handling easier than ever along with quicker recovery if any incident happens.

Cost Reduction

The biggest benefit of the DevOps strategy is maximizing profitability. DevOps cuts down the costs acquired in software development either directly or indirectly.

• Reduce network downtime costs – No one can afford to have continuous network disruptions. Bug-ridden code, overloaded infrastructure utilization, and poor service visibility are a few common causes. Automated testing and CI/CD services ensure efficient code and quick bug fixes.
• Reduced infrastructure costs – DevOps and microservices approach have proven to be a reliable and affordable solution. You can assemble extreme efficiency, thus optimizing the resource utilization per instance.
• Software Release Costs – If you have been dealing with an abundant number of software releases, you would know the chaos it causes. DevOps automates your release pipeline and enables the release faster. Besides, it reduces the human effort needed and cuts down the software release costs considerably.

Enhanced throughput

By eliminating the time-consuming task in software development processes like environment setup or manual testing, your teams become more productive and can release new features faster. With DevOps practices, you can boost response time and invest more time in offering more quality products.

Continuous support through CI/CD

In most cases, once the product is released to the customer, the development team moves on and gets into the next project leaving future problems handling responsibilities with the operation team. But, in DevOps, as the developers are working on smaller code pieces and deploying them in production they can track the bugs instantly that results in enhanced quality of the code.

Higher customer satisfaction

It doesn’t matter how good your product is, if it doesn’t meet your customer's requirement, it won’t be successful. As the development and operational team works together, the developers get to know the metrics of the product better than ever. Having a better understanding of the product user, they realize how much the product needs to be scaled.

DevOps succeeds, BUT you have to do it right

If you want to accelerate your product’s time to market, it is vital to identify and adopt the right DevOps transition strategy in your software development. Making a swift transition to DevOps practice requires new processes, new tools, and a cultural shift. Here are the fundamental steps to start your journey to optimized costs and enhanced product delivery:

• Identify the gaps and challenges
• Prepare clear objectives that the DevOps strategy to achieve
• Make a DevOps roadmap & transition plan
• Identify your DevOps toolchain
• Implement the DevOps toolchain
• Measure your DevOps metrics

DevOps Journey begins with identifying where the problem is and figuring out how to solve it. You have to analyze your current business situation and then define a goal that has high priority and can be accomplished in a short time. Once you understand what needs to be achieved, your focus should move to DevOps processes. To embrace DevOps culture, you need to abandon your old practices and adopt new processes. The following fundamental practices should be in the first queue to achieve benefits in no time:

You should also remember that chasing fancy tools and automation would not help in making a high performing business. Adopt tools, which are going to add value to your DevOps strategy. Here are some of the tools commonly used in a DevOps environment:

You have adopted DevOps, but has it truly reduced your delivery time? It is always important to measure the result of all this automation to identify the reflection of your DevOps transition and area of improvement.

Having a clear plan and the right strategy is not enough for the successful implementation of the DevOps environment. You need assistance from someone with proven expertise and relevant skills, preferably obtaining DevOps as a service to guide you through the entire process.

Conclusion

When you implement DevOps methodology, it comes crystal clear that DevOps is not just a fad; rather it is the tip of the spear, which moves the businesses towards speed delivery of quality software. It starts with the software quality to measuring customer feedback loops to make sure your product is in line with your customer needs and expectations. More precisely, everything can be attained in speed ahead of your competitor.