“Every company is now a software company.” Industry pundits have said it so often that it almost sounds cliché. Yet companies in virtually every industry depend upon the fast, reliable and secure delivery of software for operational performance and digital transformation.
That fact is driving the adoption of DevOps practices. A recent survey by GitLab found that 37 percent of organizations have one to three years of experience with DevOps, and another 25 percent have three to five years.
However, DevOps can be difficult to implement. Because developers and operational teams are accustomed to working independently, DevOps represents a cultural change that often meets with resistance. Nevertheless, DevOps offers several technology and business benefits that make the transition worth the effort.
DevOps Basics
The DevOps model is designed to integrate software development and IT operations to increase efficiency and improve collaboration. Its goal is to accelerate the software development cycle and optimize quality through continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).
With CI, developers frequently merge new code and changes into the code base for automated testing so that problems can be identified and corrected as quickly as possible. With CD, code is delivered for user acceptance testing or staging regularly so that all aspects of functionality can be tested. The goal is to minimize unexpected problems when the code is moved into production.
Faster Software Deployment
According to the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report from DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), DevOps can reduce the time required for software deployments and changes from months to days or even hours. Additionally, DevOps teams can recover from outages and service impairments in less than a day compared to a week or more for traditional operational models.
What does that mean to the business? A finely tuned DevOps team can respond quickly to modify an application based on user and customer feedback. Faster software deployment also means the organization can respond more quickly to changing demand and competitive opportunities.
Enhanced Performance
Software doesn’t work in isolation — it’s deployed on infrastructure maintained by the operational team. DevOps helps ensure that operations professionals understand what developers hope to achieve so they can build and maintain the environment accordingly. It also enables the implementation of more flexible infrastructure that can respond to changing user requirements.
Monitoring is a critical component of DevOps. According to a recent report from Allied Market Research, monitoring and performance management solutions account for a third of the DevOps market. These tools enable operations professionals to gain visibility into performance from the user’s perspective. The operations team is also in the best position to troubleshoot user problems, and identify any issues that need to be addressed through code.
Improved Security
DevOps can help integrate security into all aspects of software development to reduce vulnerabilities. It also creates a framework for reviewing infrastructure-related security policies before software is deployed. In Puppet’s 2019 State of DevOps Report, 82 percent of organizations at the highest levels of DevOps integration said it improved their security posture.
That’s because DevOps and security rely on the shared principles of culture, automation and measurement. When software is more reliable, infrastructure is more predictable and both are thoroughly tested, the environment is inherently more secure and IT teams can respond rapidly to security issues.
How Technologent Can Help
If software is vital to your organization, it makes good business sense to implement or improve upon DevOps practices. The Technologent team has extensive experience in DevOps along with IT automation, performance management and other supporting technologies. We have also placed resident consultants onsite to facilitate the DevOps transformation. Let us help you reap the benefits of DevOps while minimizing implementation challenges.
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