DevOps is a modern software application development methodology that gets its many aspects from Agile methodology. It’s a set of concepts, tools, and practices that combine development and operational efforts (Dev + Ops) to develop high-quality software applications within a rapid and shortened process. This approach is a perfect solution for most problems created by the siloed conventional development approach.
There are many benefits in DevOps methodology:
- Faster and Continuous Deployments: With its cross-functional approach, DevOps supports ‘CI/CD pipeline,’ a chain of processing elements for continuous integration and deployment. This method frequently deploys software applications by automating app deployment stages with the support of many tools like the DevOps pipeline by JFrog.
- Enhanced Customer Focus: Since the development team works closely with the customer within the entire software development life cycle, this approach improves the customer focus.
- Simplified Development Process: With DevOps, your entire development process has been simplified by breaking into continuous more minor releases.
- Enables Automation and Innovations: Because continuous releases frequently happen in DevOps, it makes a requirement and room for automation. Automation saves hours that can be spent on innovations.
- Less Cost of Production: This methodology cuts down a lot of inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the development value stream to minimize the development cost.
- Higher Security: In the DevOps domain, DevSecOps comes to ensure the security of the development throughout the entire development process with the collaboration between development, security, and operations.
Successful Stories with DevOps
- Amazon: In 2010, Amazon’s transition to DevOps was a significant part of its transformation from physical servers to the AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud. They started with a continuous deployment process with their internal system called Apollo. By mid-2011, Amazon released new software to production servers every 11.6 seconds while ensuring higher quality with this approach. According to a former lead engineer at Amazon, this transition saves millions.
- Netflix: Netflix who has 100 million users for a quality streaming experience, is maintaining its place as an industry leader with the DevOps approach.
Why Many Companies Struggle to Implement DevOps
Failure to Create DevOps Culture:
The DevOps approach is not only a set of tools. Before implementing DevOps, you have to create a DevOps culture. Culture is a set of practices, beliefs, standards, and structures that strengthen your organizational structure. For instance, some major organizations have failed in continuous deployment and getting other essences of DevOps. The reason is that they were unable to identify the importance of people and processes and bridge the gap between development and operations.
Unavailability of DevOps Vision:
You should align DevOps with your business goals to make it a successful approach for software application development. When you implement DevOps, try to figure out the below points:
- Your existing software development approach and its loopholes.
- Pain points that need more attention.
- How does your DevOps roadmap need to be?
- What are your plans to train the staff?
- What will be your ultimate goal by implementing DevOps?
Then it will be easier to visualize your overall DevOps picture for your organization.
Fail to Define DevOps for Your Organization:
It’s true that DevOps improves the speed and quality of your organization’s software development and reduces inefficiencies. However, we should understand each organization has its own unique set of requirements. Your DevOps implementation should be tailored to that set of requirements.
Development versus Operations Mentality:
The concept behind DevOps is to break the conventional siloed mentality and create a cross-functional culture. Suppose the Development and Operation teams are still in their old siloed mentality. Development teams throw the software applications to operations teams over an imaginary wall. In that case, our effort will be pointless. That’s why we need to change these team members’ thinking patterns gradually.
Resistance to Change:
In any change in an organization, it’s evident that there is resistance. The same truth is common to DevOps, and that’s why we need to have a proper change management mechanism in place.
If people feel that this is an evolution, DevOps can be scary for some team members and the stakeholders. We can’t do this transformation overnight, and we should do it gradually and smoothly.
It will be better to choose a small development project and remodel it with the DevOps approach. Other teams will also want to try the benefits when the team sees the benefits, making it easy to enter into the DevOps world.
