What are the trends in DevOps Implementation?

In the competitive global business landscape, enterprises have to grapple with twin challenges: changing trends in technology and customer behavior. The demand is to deliver quality software applications quickly and update them on a continuous basis. However, with the agile methodology of development, there used to be a mismatch between what development and operations could offer to the end-users in terms of quality products and services. A need was felt to enhance the capabilities of business enterprises to bring about fast-paced product development, quick delivery of applications, and timely marketing them to the target audience.

DevOps is one step ahead of Agile and involves the operations environment being in sync with development. DevOps implementation can be said to be a one-stop solution for every challenge or requirement mentioned above. It envisions the integration of processes, cultural practices, people, and tools to enhance functional abilities. Going by statistics, the global market for DevOps methodology is expected to grow at a CAGR of 21% between 2021 and 2026. DevOps can involve several cross-functional teams working across business domains and geographies.

These teams may include business analysts, developers, software architects, quality testers, business owners, security specialists, operations personnel, partners, and suppliers. This way, the DevOps approach can help enterprises to seize marketing opportunities, reduce the time to address customer queries, advocate better communication and collaboration between cross-functional teams and business units, break silos, and earn better revenues. Despite the above-mentioned benefits, surveys have revealed that DevOps implementation is a significant challenge for more than half of enterprises.

Challenges faced by enterprises in DevOps implementation

The reasons why business enterprises have been found lacking in adopting DevOps include:

l Presence of a legacy architecture that does not facilitate the implementation of key DevOps principles, namely, continuous delivery and integration.

l Built-in resistance of people within the organization to change

l Limited or total absence of automation

l Shortage of skills to implement DevOps

l Poor usage of cloud-based resources

Now, let us find the benefits that DevOps can deliver to business enterprises, and why it has become so important for businesses to remain competitive.

Benefits of DevOps implementation

A structured and well-planned DevOps methodology can mitigate the above-mentioned challenges to a large extent and improve overall performance, productivity, safety, and efficiency. The other benefits are as follows:

Better collaboration: In a DevOps setup, employees within the organization work with a common objective in mind and follow processes that are secure, seamless, collaborative, and high-performing.

Better performance: In a waterfall model of product development, testing, and delivery, multiple teams may work on a singular piece of code. This can lead to inefficiency, redundancy, and reduced performance. On the other hand, with DevOps continuous testing, teams working in different processes and even systems have a common objective of delivering frequent releases, reducing errors and system recovery time, cutting the time of rework, and enhancing the time to market.

Better client experience: Since DevOps begins from the planning stage, client preferences and market conditions are taken into consideration. And through increased collaboration across teams, the production cycle can be reduced and the quality of software applications enhanced.

Reducing expenses: With seamless collaboration and the use of innovative practices, DevOps can help to minimize production costs. Moreover, since it follows the shift-left approach, glitches are identified early in the development cycle and fixed, thereby reducing expenses towards rework later.

What are the aspects of implementing DevOps?

To incorporate DevOps in the value chain of any business enterprise, a host of solution themes should be considered:

Continuous integration (CI): This is a process of automating code change integration from multiple modules to a single software application. Here, developers merge code changes frequently into a central repository to run tests. The process of DevOps continuous integration helps testers detect glitches faster and recover software applications from failures.

Continuous Delivery (CD): Here, automated tools are used to build, test, and deliver improvements to software codes and user environments. For every code change, automated tests are run comprising unit, regression, and performance, among others, to deliver high quality software. With the continuous testing and delivery approach, software updates are released in a phased manner. DevOps continuous testing improves product quality and reduces the timeframe for new releases.

Microservices: This describes the architecture of creating and scaling a distributed application from separate services performing specific business functions and communicating through web interfaces. Microservices deployments are driven by DevOps practices: Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

Infrastructure as a code (IaC): It involves the management of IT infrastructures such as load balancers, connection topology, virtual machines, and networks. IaC describes all network settings and parameters, as well as the software runtime environment in a textual format. This practice aims to achieve better consistency and quality resource management.

Policy as a code: Here, the codification of infrastructure is used to delineate the policies governing a software environment. It notifies how the software environment should behave, resource access for an individual or group of employees to be monitored, and the allocation of resources, including network ports, to be managed. Policy as a code helps enterprises to track, monitor, reconfigure, and validate the infrastructure through an automated procedure. It allows developers and testers to control resources while ensuring their security and compliance.

Conclusion

With increasing security considerations, both businesses and their end customers are looking at software applications that are reliable, secure, fast-loading, and best performing in an omnichannel environment. It is only by implementing DevOps solutions that such considerations can be met, and the software applications are able to deliver superior user experiences and profitability for enterprises.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality