How DevOps can change the way we build softwares

Dynamic times, fast technological advancements and increasing competition require continuous adaption and increased flexibility from employees, teams, and organisations. At the same time, these fast-paced changes also require a high amount of creative discipline from all members for tasks to complete in a timely manner and for projects to succeed. Forward thinking organisations are making efforts to change and adapt their cultural practices in order to stay with the times.

In this context, DevOps or in simple words, a combination of development and operations has become an important consideration for businesses. As the word rightly explains DevOps is a blend of Development and Operations and is an organisational culture practice that requires and trains employees from both development and operations to follow a set of guidelines, methods, tools, and processes in such a manner that it reduces cultural, knowledge, operational and executional boundaries in the firm. From software development and delivery point of view since DevOps involves Agile practices, it reduces holdups and leads to smoother and well-timed software deliveries. Software driven firms are therefore banking highly on DevOps.

But is this the only way that DevOps is changing the world of software development? No. In this blog today, we look at some of the many ways by which DevOps can facilitate collaborative change and bring in transparency in the entire software development and release processes.

How DevOps can facilitate Collaborative Change?

• With DevOps, you get agility in both development and operations which makes the systems streamlined. This practice helps reduce manual tasks that developers were spending an enormous amount of time earlier. Also, introducing DevOps as a culture helps organizations in quick customer feedback, better product, reduces failure rate and feature release time.

• DevOps tools have changed the standard operating procedures from earlier days where the individual application had to be kept up and running in large scales. With DevOps has come standardisation that has resulted in resourceful ways to arrange, organise and operate servers with lesser tools and decreased human mediation.

• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery process help organizations to ship products faster to the market. Also with such processes organizations can be sure about their feature deliveries in a stable environment which gives product team more time to add value.

• Roles and responsibilities of developers and operations persons have begun to fuse. Developers are learning and improving at operations tasks and the operations persons are learning to program. Seamless collaboration is on already visible to businesses and is on the rise.

For the successful transformation from a traditional waterfall model to continuous delivery teams need to have, the right attitude, updated tools along with understanding and implementation of the DevOps stages is most essential.

How you can start your DevOps journey?

Discover: In this phase, discover the processes mapped with development and operations. Ask questions to all the stakeholders about Why Devops; what you want to achieve with this transition; How this transition should impact your current process and current work. You will be surprised with each one coming with his version of expectation from DevOps, but yeah important here is to map these requirements from different stakeholders to make sure they meet the business needs.

Plan: Very important term of planning for Devops is “Continuous”. The entire DevOps journey should be planned on how to make the software development and release continuous and not discrete. Continuous Planning, Continuous Development, Continuous Integrations, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Testing, Continuous Monitoring & Continuous Feedback are important phases associated with DevOps journey.

Act: Once you have planned all the phases of your DevOps journey, it’s time to start implementing the same. Using the right tools for DevOps implementation is very critical. Following are some tools which can help you in your DevOps journey

• Git: Code Repository and versioning tool

• Jenkins: Continuous Integration tool

• Puppet: Configuration Management and Deployment Tools

• Selenium: Continuous Testing tool

• Nagios: Continuous Monitoring tool

• Docker: Containerization tool

Optimize: Once you have implemented your DevOps, and it is running smoothly, start collecting data points for improvements in each of the phase mentioned above. Collecting data points in each phase can help you to modernize your CI/CD pipeline and make your processes more efficient.

DevOps is certainly a way forward for enterprise organizations to create a culture of continuous transparency, efficiency & optimization. If you are looking to start your DevOps journey, talk to our experts. Send us your requirements on sales@iviewlabs.com