With the rapid technology innovation and adoption across sectors, there has been a rising need for streamlining and upgrading the product development lifecycle, so as to cut costs, enhance efficiency and create agile processes for scale and reach. Under these circumstances, an approach termed as ‘DevOps’ has been disrupting the product development ecosystem, bringing in a new synergy. As a term coined from the combination of ‘development’ and ‘operations’, DevOps is much more than technology and refers to the collaboration of the IT operations and product/ app development efforts. This arrangement ensures that there is a complete alignment of software expectations with the stakeholders, and the end product perfectly meets client requirements and can be implemented almost immediately. With varied benefits that practically solve several problems with one solution, the DevOps approach has been showcasing extremely promising results!
The DevOps approach has been revolutionizing the software development and delivery process, by enabling the creation of customized and agile ecosystems, through a collaborative approach. This is crucial during these times, mainly because it offers efficiency, speed, optimization of resources, and customization, in a secure environment and can be easily modified or replicated. This approach helps businesses to revamp strategies, align their products with organization goals, and empower teams to create, build, and achieve continuous integration. And, it’s gaining acceptance at a rapid rate. A recent report by Cloud Native Computing Foundation better elucidates this point. According to the report, some 92% of respondents now say they use containers in production, an extraordinary 300% increase from just 23% in March 2016.
Further elaborating the benefits of DevOps, as under:
- Enhanced Efficiency: Due to the collaborative approach, a DevOps process ensures the entire project runs seamlessly and with improved operational efficiency, as there are no loopholes or errors in understanding between the key stakeholders. Not only does this approach ensure a better and smarter product but also reduces the turnaround time, and cuts out the complexities involved in the earlier process, when the product development and IT operations teams worked in silos.
- Speedy Delivery: This is one of the key benefits of DevOps and has also been the main driver for the popularity of the tech process. DevOps also enables organizations to release more high-quality software and applications with a quick turnaround time by leveraging various testing tools at the beginning of the development cycle. This eliminates congestion towards the end of the production cycle and ensures a smooth and seamless development from start to end. Thanks to the collaborative approach, the end product turns out to be in sync with the client’s expectations, resulting in fewer rejections of prototypes, lesser modifications, and thus speedy completion and delivery of a perfect product that not only meets but also surpasses the client expectations. Further, the agile and reliable character of DevOps ensures further scalability at nominal costs.
- Reliable and scalable: DevOps revolves around the strategy that boosts enterprise capability for continuous software delivery and facilitates customers to seize market opportunities while reducing the time for customer feedback simultaneously. This is possible through quality application updates and infrastructure changes so that teams can effectively ensure speedy deliveries while maintaining an optimum experience for end-users, making the entire process extremely agile, scalable, and reliable. It also brings the ease of migration of the application to the cloud.
- Enhanced security: Security is increasingly becoming one of the key focus areas of new tech innovations the world over. The extremely agile character of DevOps processes ensures that businesses can adopt DevOps and leverage it without compromising on the security of their internal tech infrastructure ecosystem. DevOps processes can be easily adapted to function with the constraints of a secluded corporate ecosystem, in line with the company integrated security testing tools, without any hindrance in the efficacy, speed, and reliability of the process.
- Cost-Effective Solutions: DevOps brings the development and operations team in one environment, thereby cutting down on lengthy operational coordination, trial and error time during the testing process, and optimizes resources so as to complete software development on time. This enables organizations to create products/ software at a fraction of time and cost as compared to traditional development approaches.
In other terms, DevOps allows collaboration across teams and rectify problems present anywhere in the entire software development lifecycle. With the elimination of working in silos, DevOps enables easy communication among teams leading to greater transparency and enables each team to focus on their specialized fields. It also helps in an improved mean time to recovery and lower downtime. All of these factors create a positive and significant impact on an organization’s balance sheet at the end of the fiscal year. Hence, it acts as a key component in the digital transformation journey and it can help organizations aggregate a lot of value and save time as it removes several technical challenges lying in the path of implementation. It is safe to say that DevOps is the future of software development.
The above article is authored by Sachin Nigam – CTO & Co-Founder, Goavega Software Pvt. Ltd.
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