Why Should You Adopt DevOps and What are the Benefits it Offers?
DevOps is one of the most progressive methodologies we happened upon in recent times. It was no secret how arduous it was to develop software under rigid approaches such as a waterfall. The underlying idea of DevOps, which fuels its journey, is that under development and operations teams don’t have to work like workers at an assembly line as they work together and achieve better results.
This cohesiveness made DevOps team members realize benefits such as faster development and deployment, easier testing, and Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). The latter allows the project members to perpetually better the product as and when the requirements arise.
But, if the methodology is so robust, why is it that not everyone is adopting DevOps? This may be the question upon which you are pondering now. While it may seem like an optional approach, DevOps is fast becoming the methodology that most companies are leaning on. DevOps adoption has increased tremendously due to the pandemic and is encouraged by the advent of cloud and IT solutions.
However, dousing expectations in Gartner’s survey where they observed that 75% of DevOps projects should not meet the expectations. This failure shall be triggered by a lack of organizational learning and a lag in adoption speed.
While this is a grave finding, the survey underscores certain aspects. First, the challenges which shall bring down the DevOps project are the discords and cultural hurdles in a company. And it is unsurprising as various companies are jumping onboard the DevOps without adequately researching and with knowledge deficiencies regarding the methodology. Additionally, it is not just a production approach. It is a cultural change that shall bring a better and more collaborative ambiance to your organization.
These shortcomings and potential failures underscore the importance of embracing DevOps only after considering the key aspects which shall shape your future. Additionally, it would help if you educated the internal and critical stakeholders about DevOps and what changes it will usher once it is adopted. So, in this blog, we shall explore why you should adopt DevOps and what significant benefits drive DevOps adoption.
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Why DevOps?
DevOps is the methodology that is moving the world. While the waterfall and agile kept the wheels turning, DevOps ushered in a paradigm change with its approach to production. It brought in various benefits which outclassed both waterfall and agile. Before diving into why you should take on DevOps, let’s understand what DevOps is.
In every organization, there are departments where invisible and unspoken siloes exist. These barriers impede product development and perpetuate differences between the teams. Wicking away such differences and encouraging collaboration, the developers have bettered the Agile process. While the underlying principles are mostly the same, DevOps allows an organization to automate their solutions better than the solutions developed on Agile and Waterfall.
Useful link: Waterfall Vs. Agile Vs. DevOps- Which Production Method Should You Take?
Benefits Driving DevOps Adoption
AI and other such computational technologies enable automation is one of the most significant benefits of DevOps. This advantage reduces the scope for errors and allows your project members to expend their efforts elsewhere. Additionally, with automation shouldering some of the crucial weight, you can potentially reduce your expenses. From faster time to market to reduced resource usage, automation brings many benefits that allow you to shun unwanted costs.
Automation can effectively handle simple, mundane tasks to complex, computational tasks, whether payroll maintenance or update deployment, automation holds the firepower enough to execute the tasks without erring. In addition, organizations can reap many other unique benefits based on their requirements. These unique advantages are experienced by organizations when they rope in an able MSP, such as the Stevie Awards winner Veritis, which bagged the award for its DevOps excellence.
As one embarks on the DevOps journey, it is essential to understand that DevOps is a technology, not a magic wand. It has its fair share of challenges, and one has to ramp up the usage of DevOps in an incremental way. Also, never try to anneal work culture problems with DevOps.
While DevOps brings in a cultural change, it is not a solution to your pre-existing flaws. Instead, it is wise to foster the growth of talented individuals in the teams who can harness the benefits of DevOps and imbibe keenness among the team members when it comes to DevOps.
Apart from automation, other benefits would entice you. With SaaS being the most popular strategy for distributing software licenses, it’s easier than ever for your clients to depart if they’re unhappy. This might significantly impact your income stream if your company strategy is built on regular subscriptions (rather than typical outright licensing payments).
Useful link: Top 10 DevOps Tools to Pick for Your Business
Maintenance is made easy by containers, and developers are using this technology to better their project lifecycle and the product itself. Containerization, the implementation of containers, gained momentum as most companies had difficulties managing virtual machines for their local, progression, and testing platforms.
Dockers are lightweight, portable, reusable, easy to use, and inexpensive. Furthermore, by removing the hypervisor, containerization overcomes all of the drawbacks of virtualization. Therefore, companies must consider the advantages of Dockerization while bringing Development and Operations closer together.
To trim expenses, it’s critical to supply or de-provision resources in real-time. For instance, a commerce business house would want to supply more assets than typical during periodic traffic spikes. Startups that do not track their demands cannot allocate resources efficiently, resulting in greater expenses and a poor user experience.
Some recent firms have also integrated auto-scaling, which allows them to maintain application availability while automatically scaling capacity up and down. It’s a prevalent misconception that only big businesses require continuous infrastructure oversight and that startups may avoid it.
Another benefit DevOps offers is resource planning. Overstocking resources is a prevalent issue among startups, and continuous infrastructure monitoring may help with this issue and various other problems. Firms may monitor their resources and set up automatic warnings to increase availability using infrastructure monitoring solutions.
These solutions also provide expanded monitoring for startups through dashboards and analytics. Some monitoring tools may also assist startup owners in monitoring system performance and CPU use and identifying potential risks and vulnerabilities, allowing them to take proactive measures ahead of time. Startups may also employ MSPs to handle their infrastructure’s incident management, change management, and replica management.
Consider the mobility of your items while designing them. It’s possible that a product was designed on a legacy platform, but due to poor performance, it has to be upgraded to a better state devoid of flaws triggered by legacy systems. In addition, most companies are inherently dynamic, and their needs vary over time.
Migrating workloads to a new platform is next to impossible in such instances. Instead, startups should design their products such that they can be easily moved to other platforms like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, or Datacenters. In addition to SLA, legality, migration costs, and reliability, entrepreneurs must examine other factors while considering these technologies.
Useful link: A Guide to DevOps Implementation on Google Cloud
Minimum requirements to make DevOps work
We have embraced the philosophy that every client comes along with unique needs. These unique needs help us create solutions that are customized and cost-effective. However, there is always a basic framework for DevOps adoption. Let’s see what that is.
The most important aspect is that you need to have an internal IT team. For DevOps to succeed in your company, you’ll need both a development team and an IT team. DevOps may not be for you if you outsource all of your technology requirements and have no intentions to cultivate in-house expertise in the future.
The size of your company is the next factor to consider. For example, if you’re a well-established market leader with a reliable in-house IT team which is overburdened, it would be better to rope in an MSP to handle the DevOps integration and maintenance.
However, if you are an emerging company with a small development team meeting your business requirements, it may be wise to postpone DevOps integration. It is to be understood that DevOps is an approach that shoulders heavy workloads without consuming much time and hampering the quality.
However, scoping out DevOps and understanding what it takes to become DevOps ready would be apt for a startup. This is an advantage that smaller companies have over massive companies as they can start with a clean slate. Furthermore, with a proper understanding, you can avoid teething troubles with DevOps adoption.
Useful link: Future of DevOps: Top 6 DevOps Trends in 2022 and Beyond
Capping it Off
No one-size-fits-all ‘DevOps consulting‘ template can be applied to every IT-reliant company. DevOps is a powerful technique that can allow you to reinvent your workflow and develop, deploy and maintain products better in a lesser timeframe. However, your existing infrastructure and team members won’t be DevOps ready until the management decides to go with the methodology.
From collaboration to CI/CD, there are several aspects that an organization would have to go over with during the DevOps adoption process. It is not everyone’s cup of tea regarding DevOps, as it is more than production methodology. Most do away with this by bringing in an MSP such as Veritis.
Stevie Award Winner Veritis has developed cutting-edge solutions for various clients. Be Fortune 500 or a budding company; we house the DevOps expertise to cater to your needs. Approach us with your unique needs, and we shall tailor the unique solutions which allow you to unlock your potential.
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