DevOps and Cloud Trend: A Perfect Alignment of IT and Business!

By Veritis

DevOps and Cloud Trend a Perfect Alignment of IT and Business

A major shift in the global industry has been the change in customer preferences from ‘just product’ to ‘product experience’.

This trend is making the world economy, especially IT, more of services-driven, while continuing to encourage product development in the background.

What’s driving this trend makes the suspense element, and that’s obviously the Cloud-DevOps combination!

Cloud-DevOps Collaboration

Cloud and DevOps are two game-changer IT solutions that evolved in response to societal transformation caused by consumer run for better product experience. While innovation continues to be on priority, companies are also emphasizing on offering a better product experience as a key to success.

This demand for end-user experience is changing the way IT business all-together by showing a direct impact on the software delivery cycle. Eventually, companies are also realizing the need to bridge gaps between them and the end consumer.

One significant step in the bridging process is laying ‘equal focus on both development and operations’, unlike the past where firms just focused on development, leaving operations to the consumer.

In achieving this goal, DevOps helped firms bridge the Development- Operations gaps (DevOps) and Cloud took the responsibility of handling operations that firms take up on end-user behalf.

What Cloud Achieved?

Companies efforts to take-up operations responsibility along with development led to the rise of on-demand services. On-demand cloud services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) started playing their effective role across the process chain at every level.

While SaaS took care of software facilitation, IaaS filled all infrastructure requirements such as on-demand networks, storage, and virtual machines. And, PaaS facilitated on-demand databases, application containers, cache workflow engines.

Cloud Services - SaaS, IaaS and PaaS

Through this act, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) succeeded in:

  • Providing on-demand services to consumers at every level
  • Allowing consumers to pay only to what they consume
  • Taking over management burden from customers

But all this wouldn’t have happened without DevOps!

How DevOps Helped?

Cloud providers succeeded in offering better consumer experience and releasing operational burden on customers through on-demand services. But that wouldn’t have been possible without DevOps support for seamless functioning.

Although Cloud services ensure business agility with IT infrastructure flexibility, making the IT strategy aligned with business goals remains key. In the process, siloed functionalities failed to facilitate Continuous Integration (CD) & Continuous Delivery (CD) cycles, continuous innovation and change management procedures.

The advent of DevOps practices changed the game all together bridging gaps between operations/business and development.

For example, Cloud offers SaaS but who facilitates the seamless functioning of the service? This is where DevOps role comes in!

DevOps facilitated the seamless functioning of Cloud’s on-demand services by ensuring that these services dissolve gaps between functions and operations, which finally reflected in better user experience.

Once the user experience is achieved, the next immediate customer expectation is the continuous support and quality enhancement. Accomplishing this goal is the result of operations-development collaboration, and DevOps exactly did that with the SaaS model similar to Agile in the software-as-product model.

While Agile taught developers to stand in line with the business goals, DevOps simplified it further by teaching operations to stay aligned with the speed and flexibility that developers operate in.

DevOps role has been very key in digital transformation strategy.

While Cloud is the result of the digital strategy, DevOps has been instrumental in taking cloud capabilities to the next level by embedding its key principles such as increased agility, high innovation, shortened work cycles, fast-paced delivery and faster recovery rate from failures, among others in the software process chain.

In a nutshell, the Cloud-DevOps trend has been successful in relieving IT departments from operational tasks such as provisioning hardware or patching operating systems and encouraged them to focus more on aspects that add value to the core business goals.