For many years, the development pipeline used to be fragmented in most companies, even the most forward-looking ones. The major bottleneck in the software development operations has been the absence of continuous collaboration between the development and operations parts of the process.
These two teams used to work separately from each other. Software developers worked on the code of the software products, and operations staff were responsible for customer service, product launch, and daily app and data center operations. As a result of such fragmentation, some dev-related processes became cumbersome and redundant, causing organizational friction.
Here’s the point where DevOps services and solutions entered the scene to optimize all processes in development agencies via automation, agility, continuity, and speed of product deployment.
Also Read: Best Product Management Software to Run your Work Smoothly
What is DevOps?
In a nutshell, DevOps is a revolution in the approach to software and app development. It reconsiders the traditional collaboration model between the dev and ops teams in a software development company to erase the boundaries, set up integrated collaborative processes, and remove boundaries between these two departments. As a result, the whole development and deployment process becomes automated, agile, and optimized for frequent launches with more rigorous QA testing.
What Can DevOps as a Service Do for Your Business?
While the DevOps stack is usually selected for each specific company individually, depending on its existing infrastructure and staffing, buying and setting up the DevOps toolkit on-site may be too costly for many companies. Thus, the DevOps as a service option has become a viable alternative to expensive and lengthy in-house DevOps software integration. This variant of DevOps use is exclusively cloud-based. So, it offers more flexibility and cost-effectiveness to innovation-oriented businesses limited in their budget.
Using DevOps as a service, you can remove the complexities of data management and information flows from your organizational processes. Simple and user-friendly onboarding instruments can help capture the logic of the entire toolchain, thus helping the team understand the system’s logic and operate productively within it. You get a single optimized space for all development operations, communication, task management, documentation, etc.
As a result of cloud-based DevOps adoption, you can quickly achieve noticeable improvements in collaboration, source code monitoring, process management, and reporting. The overall business approach becomes more flexible, helping your company adapt to market changes quickly and without stress.
Which DevOps to Choose from?
Once you decide to adopt DevOps in your organization, you need to choose the tools and products relevant to your business. Here’s the product range to consider when researching the DevOps market:
Cloud Platforms
When talking about DevOps as a service, cloud DevOps providers are the first to mention it. They typically offer the full range of DevOps instruments you might need for effective and comprehensive process optimization. These offers include Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and a wide variety of private cloud offerings. The best about this approach is the stackable format of the DevOps toolchain, allowing you to compile the customized toolkit you will need for specific goals’ attainment.
Containers and Orchestration Tools
Containers and orchestration instruments are vital for bringing the fragmented processes together and avoiding operational frictions. They help the company ensure flexible deployment, ensure hybrid or multi-cloud agility of the produced products, and improve resource management. The most popular DevOps tools for these purposes are Compose, Kubernetes, Docker: Swarm, etc.
CI/CD Instruments
The CI/CD approach is meant to shorten the release lifecycle, minimize the meantime to repair the detected bugs, and remove all friction from the deployment process. The tools serving these goals include scalable CI solutions, seamless decomposition and parallel running, and DevOps instruments for automated code review and reporting. The most frequently used CI/CD setup tools are Jenkins, Concourse, Bitbucket Pipelines, and Bamboo, among others.
Configuration Management
The configuration and infrastructure management tools aim to create a consistent environment allowing automated testing, autoscaling, and relevant alert sending to preserve a healthy, uninterrupted workflow without quality compromises. This environment ensures better monitoring and testability, shortens the SDLC time, and enables better capacity planning. These goals are attained with the help of Terraform, Fargate, Nomad, Prometheus, ELK, and other DevOps tools of your choosing.
Databases
No digital product can work without a reliable, robust database, and your DevOps toolchain should integrate one seamlessly. The available tools include MySQL, MongoDB, PostgresSQL, MariaDB, etc.
Testing
No software developer can guarantee the quality of its products without rigorous testing. DevOps offers a new degree of automated testing that enables consistent and reliable feedback and more frequent releases upon QA checks. The DevOps approach to testing incorporates mobile, API, Web, and microservices tools, BDD, DDT, and TDD, as well as smoke, regressing, and benchmark testing. You can also integrate parallel, scalable testing solutions in your environment to achieve better results. The DevOps products for this aim include JMeter, Artillery, Tsung, and the like.
Give Your Business a Boost with DevOps
As the market dynamics suggest, only agile and flexible development companies have a chance to survive in the modern business reality. Thus, integrating DevOps in your organizational processes gives you the upper hand in the market competition with better QA control, faster development, and more frequent deployment. Focus on the collaboration improvements via DevOps, and you will enjoy a positive transformation of the organizational culture, focused on productivity, quality, and teamwork.
