It is quite a known fact that the use of Devops is on the rise these days. The reason is also quite understandable. Apart from offering a variety of advantages to businesses, it also provides them with the capacity to deliver an unhindered service to the clients, at all times.

With a constant shift in the field of technology, market demands also vary from time to time. DevOps allows the enterprises to cope with these constant changes, and be at par with the current market conditions, by allowing greater:

• Security
• Stability
• Quality
• Efficiency

So basically the question that arises from the above deduction is, how does it manage to do it?

Broadly speaking, it works on the principle of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), i.e. the process used by the software industry to design, develop and test high-quality software, to meet or exceed the customer expectations, within a stipulated time slot. The entire workload is divided between a Developer (Development Team) and a Systems Administrator (Operations Team). Now, the entire SDLC process when subjected to the traditional method of delivery goes about like this:

Objective:

To offer new & exciting products to the customers, faster than the concerned competitors.

Phase at the development end:

• The code is written for new products, features, security updates, and bug fixes, in the development environment.
• A waiting period of weeks for the work to be placed in the production environment.
• A delay, thus increasing the pressure of staying competitive, as new features and products get launched by the competitors in quick succession.
• Also, the delay makes it difficult to manage both the code that is pending to be pushed into the production environment and the development of the next feature to be produced.
• An error-laden code introduced in the production environment, as it was initially written for the development environment.

Phase at the operational end:

• The responsibility of the systems administrator to maintain and assure the uptime of the production environment.
• The set of servers that need to be administered, constantly increases, as new products are continuously launched.
• Moreover, increasing the number of servers does increase the cost, also, the tools used to administer a few servers are rendered ineffective against a must larger volume of servers.
• Now, when the new code is released, it takes a bit of fabrication to fit it in the production environment, hence here the scheduling of code deployment is required.
• As a result, the operations team need to make sure that the code is error-free before being deployed to the production environment, giving rise to a feeling of negligence being projected by the development team.

These differences between the Dev team and the Ops team, on a regular basis, often results in a debate over the Code quality. So, what can be done to help the Dev and the Ops teams to work better and efficiently, to achieve the same target?

Once the Dev and the Ops team come together, the focus is more on the automation, in this methodology.

The fundamentals include:

• Writing software in small chunks, which are then integrated, tested, monitored, in short time, vs. the traditional way of writing and testing large chunks of software over a long period.
• Have identical development and production environment. Thus, increasing the frequency of deployments and improving the time to deploy new code.
• Adopting an iterative process to monitor, measure and improve the code and operations daily.
• Improving the ability to respond to the market needs that impact the software.
• Instead of building and configuring infrastructure and software manually, on an ad-hoc basis, writing configuration management code, which describes how things should be built, as a result, infrastructure built at scale to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of servers in multiple locations, using different types of hardware.

Hence, DevOps integrates developers and operations teams to improve collaboration and productivity by automating infrastructure, automating workflows and continuously measuring application performance.

Now, coming to the main question: Why Enterprises should embrace DevOps?

It can be quite overwhelming and complicated for enterprises to make this shift to DevOps and embrace automation over manual. But the bottom line is that if they do not progress with the ever-growing market trends, they would soon be outdated. With the increase in mobile and on-demand services, it all boils down to what consumers want, and when they want it. Hence, without DevOps and the ability to automate processes, leading the pack would be next to impossible.

Table: Traditional IT vs DevOps

Outcomes of DevOps Methodology in Software Development Lifecycle

• Continuous Delivery & Faster Updates: The ability to update your applications quickly and efficiently while achieving continuous delivery are among the greatest benefits that come from shifting to DevOps.
• Improved Workflow: DevOps and automation will remove many of the inefficiencies found in traditional methodologies. By automating repeated manual tasks, human error can be eliminated to a large degree which means developers are not having to double back and correct input errors and can reduce time to market by focusing their energy and efforts on writing new code and finding creative solutions.
• Greater Innovation: DevOps allows enterprises to be more agile and creative. Employing DevOps systems and methodologies improves the ability to scale systems to meet changing demands from both consumers and competitors.
• Competitive Edge: Moving away from legacy software and traditional workflows and operations can keep you a step ahead of your competition. Because, as mentioned above, DevOps and automation lead to greater communication and integration between teams, it creates the ability to quickly and continuously update systems while receiving real-time feedback from users. These feedback loops not only allow for quick correction of any reported bugs, but it also provides much-needed insight into the customers’ thoughts and feelings about a product.

Conclusion

Adopting/Switching to DevOps is not a simple task. It is a complicated task, agreed. But the benefits are worth the switch. It has become a kind of necessity for enterprises to keep up with the competition. It can improve spend levels and workflow while leading to innovation that can help enterprises achieve or maintain a competitive edge. The learning agility of the workforce becomes the deciding factor when enterprises decide to switch to DevOps as the sooner the workforce receives enough hands-on experience of the new development method the higher will be the probability of success of future projects. 

Hence, why not?

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