What is DevOps? And How Could It Benefit Your Business?

There is always a new buzz in IT industry from time to time, may it be Big Data, IoT, or AI based Chatbot. An organisation / business has to quickly get accustomed to these often used phrases & trends in order to survive & surpass its competition. DevOps is one such trend that has revolutionised the software development industry owing to its capability to increase agility and improve performance in the IT department.

Though DevOps is rapidly gaining traction, confusion is still rife with many businesses being unsure what it is, and how they could capitalize on it. Considering that DevOps is a new approach to software development which is constantly changing, and its implementation & uses are swiftly evolving, it proves to be a challenge for a business to frame a conclusive definition for it.

So what is DevOps?

DevOps could be defined as a methodology that emphasises on collaboration between software developers and IT operations teams (hence, Dev-Ops), while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes.

The objective of DevOps is to achieve faster release of high-quality applications by disbanding silos and offering better clarity between development and operations teams, helping them to optimally share responsibilities, and improve processes, while gaining better understanding of software performance and elements that may affect it.

But what’s wrong with the traditional process of software development?

When there are multiple cooks involved in making the same broth, it is destined to spoil. No, I’m not veering off the topic here. Why I chose this analogy is because traditional software development process is lot similar to this. When a software is developed, typically different teams handle different stages of it. One team writes the code, the other one tests it, and the third team would deploy the solution. Since, there are many people involved, it could result in a great deal of conflicts and delays in update cycles.

With DevOps environment, this is not the case. The transparency across development, testing and operations enables better understanding of how new code impacts the performance, operations, and development, while encouraging a shared sense of responsibility and accountability.

What are the benefits of DevOps

Improved Build Quality

Since DevOps bring development & operations together, both dev-centric attributes such as features, performance & reusability, and ops-centric attributes such as deployability and maintainability are knit closely, improving the overall quality of the product. It not only helps in driving a better code quality, but also improves testing of the application / software.

Agile Application Delivery

Leveraging the Agile development & delivery process, organisations can actually reduce the time taken for release, helping them to go to market in scheduled time. DevOps with Agile also makes detection of errors at the early stage aiding quick fixes.

Improved Application Reliability

The automated delivery pipeline in DevOps keeps the snares of version control, configuration management, continuous integration, deployment, and continuous performance monitoring, contained by eliminating time-consuming & error prone manual processes. As automation limits the manual interventions, the result product is far more reliable.

Team Collaboration

DevOps dissolves the line between development & operations team. This enables both the teams avoid silos and understand the each other’s entire procedure and work together towards greater satisfaction while sharing equal responsibilities & accountability.

Executing Complex Project

Often, the build quality of a software is compromised as the project gets more complex while reaching closer to its deployment stage. At this critical stage, even a small glitch in the code could cause havoc. DevOps eliminates this risk by enabling teams to manage smaller chunks of the software solution, and using automated procedures to build, package and deploy the application.