DevOps has quickly become a buzzword in daily conversation, largely due to the fact that enterprise agility is now important given the dramatic change in the technology and business landscape. On a similar note, customer expectations are changing rapidly, as are the ways in which they engage with businesses and as a result, companies are embracing DevOps to plan, adapt, and innovate to deliver higher quality technology in less time and with a smaller budget.
As enterprises and developers move to adopt DevOps, its potential to transform the cloud computing industry becomes increasingly obvious. According to data from a 2018 LinkedIn report, DevOps is currently one of the most sought-after skills as organizations start prioritizing their DevOps deployments at a larger scale. In fact, numbers from a study by Rackspace shows that 55 percent of organizations have already implemented or adopted DevOps and are looking for DevOps engineers while a further 31 percent of these organizations are planning to use DevOps in the coming years.
Through this primer, we seek to walk you through some of the ways DevOps has transformed cloud development and why it’s one of the most sought-after skills.
Introducing DevOps
DevOps is a combination of the terms development and operations; it simply refers to the adoption of automation and programmable software development and infrastructure management processes that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. It is more effective compared to using traditional software delivery methods as it enables enterprises to better serve their clients and thus maintain a competitive edge in the market. Here’s a look at some of the ways it has transformed cloud development.
Improved Automation
Cloud computing is arguably a game changer among enterprises far and wide. It’s what defines a successful, modernized IT infrastructure thanks to benefits such as scalability and flexibility, cost-efficient pay-as-you-use pricing, among others. It enables an organization to transform its data center in the cloud. However, DevOps takes this efficiency to a whole new level.
DevOps makes it easy for organizations to eliminate waste, rework, bottlenecks and automate manual tasks across the software and infrastructure processes. In other words, it combines culture, processes and automation tools. The automation capability in particular reduces costs that arises from manual processes and increases the speed at which new services are being developed and marketed. Additionally, this improves the quality, visibility and predictability in support of application development efforts. This is highlighted by numbers from a survey by Puppet Labs which indicates that successful organizations are deploying code 30 times more frequently, with 50 percent fewer failures compared to their lower-performing counterparts thanks to DevOps.
Increased Agility
The best thing that DevOps brings to enterprises is agile development tools and processes that enhance the creation of new code far more quickly compared to traditional, “Waterfall” processes, which normally demands for sequential requirements analysis, development, integration, testing, deployment and maintenance. But with DevOps, the story is different as it includes everything from online code repositories to new development languages. The processes involved in DevOps may involve change management to help teams adapt to the self-organizing, self-managing, cross-functional Scrum teams that produce code in rapid “Sprints.” The result of all this is that it decreases deployment times as new software features can be made available in days instead of waiting for a monthly or quarterly production release cycle.
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Lower Risk and Improved Security
A study by CA Technologies, aided by market research firm Freeform Dynamics indicates that DevOps can deliver significant benefits. Data from the study shows that organizations that use DevOps are 2.5 times more likely to have seen improvements in customer retention; twice as likely to have seen improvements in customer acquisition; 3.4 times more likely to have seen progress on market share; and twice as likely to have seen a positive impact on revenue growth.
And this is because of benefits such as lower risk and improved security. DevOps enables early identification of quality concerns and significantly lowers risk. One of the key features of DevOps is frequent deployments and this means developers receive real-time feedback about quality and are able to respond promptly, thus facilitating a continuous learning environment. Additionally, DevOps means an operational state that is more stable and secure. DevOps is all about a continuous delivery approach and this implies that new features that come to market are elastically scalable and highly resilient.
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Closing Thoughts
No doubt about it: DevOps is becoming the cornerstone of cloud development. Organizations want to innovate faster, get new products to market sooner, adopt new and more productive ways of working and accelerate customer service. And that’s what DevOps brings to the table. In essence, it is a new paradigm within cloud development that completely transforms the way of working between Development and Operations teams. It enables enterprises to deliver cloud solutions faster and more reliably, while remaining flexible to react to changing market feedback. It allows organizations to move from traditional phased delivery models to a continuous delivery mind-set.
As a result, DevOps has become a differentiating factor in determining which companies are evolving and the ones that are stagnating. That’s why all organizations today are integrating DevOps into their operating model and are constantly looking for professionals that are skilled in DevOps.