In recent years, more and more businesses have been employing agile development to bring their ideas to life in record time to keep up with audience demand.  Applications can be developed in a matter of mere days or weeks with the right team in place. It’s been outstanding for businesses looking to keep their competitive edge.  Or, at least it is for those who think ahead to what happens next after the application has been completed.  

Once your innovative ideas have been brought to life, there’s still a lot of work to be done.  You have to bring an operations team on board, start your request for a server, talk to a database administrator to request a database, and that’s just to start.  If you’re lucky and everything falls into place, you can have a server and a database for your test environment ready in a few days or weeks. Development and eventual operations is a process that deals with inflexible operations and distributed ownership. 

As the industry continues to evolve, the focus has been on improving the speed and flexibility between the business and the development side of IT. This is where you can reap the most benefits.  But, it only works if you’re able to keep the same agile pace during the maintenance of your application. And, this is where DevOps can make a huge impact. 

What is DevOps?

From design through the development process and on to production support, DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers working together through the entire service lifecycle.  It’s a coordinated effort that’s characterized by operations staff employing many of the same techniques as developers use for their work. DevOps is essentially a cultural shift that breaks down barriers between the development team and operations team.  Instead of having two isolated teams, this concept focuses on bringing the operations lifecycle and development teams under one agile experience umbrella.  

Organizations that adopt the DevOps concept will make use of a single dedicated team that will remain responsible for a given product for its entire lifecycle.  DevOps brings the full IT team into the agile mindset. The main goal is to improve deployment frequency so that applications get to the market, faster, to lower the failure rate of new releases, to shorten lead time between fixes, and to improve disaster recovery time.  

What DevOps Can Do For You

There are many great advantages to adopting the DevOps concept.  Some of the benefits a DevOps team can bring to your business include:    

  • Transfer Elimination – DevOps eliminates the need to transfer knowledge between departments, as it’s a single team that owns the entire lifecycle and is responsible for all aspects.  The ownership and work stay within the same team, though they still rely on the support of other units within a given organization. With this one central team in place, you get better quality results of software and its maintenance since everyone on the dedicated DevOps team fully understands the intricacies of development at each stage and can troubleshoot accordingly and efficiently.  
  • Distributed Responsibility – Teams should be able to adapt towards the needs of the products that they maintain.  With this allowance, teams are able to come up with better, more creative ideas for maintenance and improvement thanks to their previous experience. 
  • Agility – Because you’ll have agile teams and processes throughout an application’s entire lifecycle, your business will be able to achieve an even faster market time for new products and functionality.
  • Targeted Needs – With a DevOps team, operations aren’t just about keeping business in motion.  A dedicated team is able to listen to your user audience to see what issues they’re facing so that they can implement necessary fixes and functionality.  
  • Cost Reduction – Because there is no handover between separate teams, DevOps means that you can reduce cost and risk after deployment.  Your one dedicated team that developed the functionality is involved all the way through an application going live, and they’re there post-launch for support during that risky period following.  

Just as many businesses changed their mindset to adopt agile development, now is the time to embrace the shift to the adoption of DevOps.  To do so successfully, you need to change your way of thinking and working. It’s all about embracing the core values of the DevOps concept – automation, measurement, and sharing.  With a centralized process in place, objective measurement, and the sharing of ideas, your organization can increase application output, change the market landscape, and reap the rewards of greater ROI.