Success will not come easily unless companies lay the groundwork for it. In the fierce competition, seizing market opportunities is a key challenge for companies. Companies rely on various IT solutions to ensure timely delivery of products to markets and streamline operations. But are they effective like they are supposed to be? This question is aimed at C-level executives who are at the forefront of the finance, healthcare, and insurance sectors, to name a few.
Experts say that DevOps is a lean and agile approach aimed at capturing market opportunities. For this, it is necessary to integrate the development and operations team to automate the processes. The key is to behave like a production system where the development and QA team work together and work well before you’re ready for deployment. The agile environment helps to improve the quality process where innovation is encouraged among team members and the entire execution process is simplified.
When describing DevOps, it is also necessary to understand the difference between ‘agile’ and ‘DevOps’. This is to ensure potential organizations need to understand the key difference between the two. Agile is about a shift in thinking that is limited in scope. By contrast, the scope of DevOps is broad, encompassing cultural change with the participation of all stakeholders involved in the delivery of IT products. For this, release managers use tools like application release automation and continuous integration tools to achieve project goals by emphasizing the continuous delivery approach.
Integration leads to standardization
Similarly, DevOps encourages communication within the team working on the project to analyze gaps and fix them before product release. Now the question is how to improve product quality by standardizing processes. To understand more about DevOps, let’s take the example of testing, an important phase in product development. The traditional method of learning from mistakes and stopping repeating them is time consuming and expensive. To solve this problem, the DevOps approach requires improved communication between development, business, and test teams from the planning phase to ensure that all three stakeholders are well informed about the new product workflow. To be specific, this means integrating the development environment, the test environment, the staging environment, and the production environment where all stakeholders move in one unimpeded direction in the workflow. Once testers are involved from day one, the chances of identifying and fixing gaps during each sprint are greater. It is at this stage that the importance of automation arises, as it is vital to ensure that standardized processes are automated to obtain the best product quality. The end result is a quality product that reaches the market at a faster rate.
DevOps features
What are the functions that DevOps integrates? For all those who aspire to use this approach, it is necessary to know the integration of various functions such as:
• Continuous integration
• Continuous deployment
• Records management
• Load balancing
• Supervision
• Infrastructure management
Organizations need to have a clear understanding of DevOps automation and how to get maximum results through a DevOps approach. For this, it is important to understand that continuous monitoring of the application and environments are the key to business success by improving code and processes.
Do companies have a DevOps strategy?
Companies must have a DevOps strategy to:
• Measure DevOps business drivers and organizations initiatives.
• Evaluate important areas of DevOps that align with the organization’s goals.
• Prioritize projects by size and duration.
Strategies are vital to gain visibility in a competitive age. DevOps itself is a combination of strategies that understand product and process gaps aimed at producing standard software products and services. If companies are convinced of the need for a DevOps strategy, they can count on reputable IT vendors who can suggest the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of DevOps. They will examine what can be automated after identifying gaps in the existing development and operations process to improve it. In short, moving towards DevOps automation is advantageous for companies.