Importance of DevOps in the Software development process

Though there are various methods to enhance IT efficiency, DevOps has presented the results that we cannot ignore. DevOps is a process where software development and its operation are combined to produce products with speed and more efficiency. DevOps (Development and operations) encourages collaborating development and operation teams in order to deliver the applications and services in a quick manner.

What is the need for DevOps?

Before the introduction of DevOps, the development and operation team of Software Development Company in California used to work in isolation. Testing and deployment process was done once the design was completely built. This made the team members spend large amount of time in testing and deployment and less amount of time was spend in building of the project. In addition, the coding and operation team has different timelines which contributed to further delays.

How is DevOps different?

To break down the enterprise silos, where units work individually and where process, management, and information is guarded, DevOps is introduced. There is a need for better collaboration and communication to serve the IT business’s need of an organization. DevOps is a culture which promotes fast and stable workflow through IT operations. One goal of DevOps is to quicken the production and to detect the problems as and when they occur without interrupting other services.

Reasons why DevOps is important:

DevOps is a set of processes which unifies the development teams to speed up and complement software development. DevOps allows enterprises to build and develop products at a faster rate in comparison to traditional software development methods. Here are some reasons why DevOps is important:

1. Short Development cycles and quick innovation – With biased response from the developmental and operational team, it gets difficult to find out if the application is operational or not. This delays the process of product development and testing.

With proper collaboration, the team’s application gets ready to use more quickly. This is especially true in this scenario where faster innovation keeps a company ahead of its competition.

1. Significantly less implementation failure and recovery time – Programming defect is the main reason why there is implementation failure. With short development cycles, DevOps encourages frequent code versions which make it easier to detect the code defects. This makes the team use their time in reducing the implementation failure by using agile programming methodology, which requires collaboration and standard programming. In addition, recovery time is also faster when development and operation team work together.
2. Better collaboration and communication – DevOps software development culture keeps the team happy and productive. The DevOps culture focuses on team performance rather than individual goals. When a team starts to trust each other they can innovate and experiment more efficiently.

DevOps eliminates the need of passing the application to the processes and waiting to see what is going to happen. DevOps has no wait, and the process is transparent as all individual work together towards a common goal.

1. High competencies – As DevOps offers high efficiency, the process accelerates and becomes less prone to errors. DevOps tasks can be automated. Continuous integration of the servers automates the coding process, which reduces the manual work needed. This allows software engineers to focus on completing the tasks that cannot be automated.
2. Reduce costs and Staff - DevOps very effectively reduces the costs and the need of the IT staff. It is assumed that DevOps can reduce the IT costs to as much as 30% and IT staff to up to 35%.

Tough there are many advantages of adopting DevOps but sometimes pursuing advancement cannot be comfortable because it needs the team to move out from the comfort zones. Remember that there are challenges at first, but the road is shiny ahead. Here are a few challenges that a company may face when they seek to adopt DevOps:

1. Managing legacy apps and systems – The first problem that the team has to face is the maintenance of legacy applications which were built without keeping the DevOps in mind. In the starting, you will need to phase out such application slowly and then gradually you will have to transition your customer to new version which is maintained by DevOps system.
2. Choosing the right projects- It’s tempting to use DevOps for every project; however, this is not the right strategy. Sometimes DevOps can slow down the procedure. So one should be diligent while selecting the projects to use DevOps. Its always good to remember that DevOps is an operational strategy which won’t fit all the time for all the projects.
3. Tools clashes between Dev and Ops – Dev and Ops team has a completely different set of tools, and it is beneficial to let both the team collaborate and integrate the tools that they use. Ensure that the tools used are aligned with the company’s goals and are focused on the primary objective – development of apps.

DevOps is in alignment with our modern technological world. It offers predictability, maintainability, and cost efficiency allowing the organizations to shift their code deployment cycles to weeks and months rather than years.

Working as CTO at Rushkar Information Technology LLP. Having 9+ years of experience in IT industry, I'm dealing with major technology platforms - Java, C#.NET, IoT, Raspberry PI, etc. Served 300+ local, international satisfied clients.