People working in IT companies come across the term ‘DevOps’ quite frequently. But then what does this term mean? What is DevOps and what does it mean?
It would be easier if I try to explain it with a simple example.
Let us assume Netflix has two teams:
- Development Team (Let's call them D) - The team is responsible for writing code and developing new features
- Operations Team (Let's call them O) - The team is responsible for making sure Netflix runs as it should. They support the users and help Netflix run smoothly.
For the past six months, team D has been working on a critical new feature. They finally wrapped the project and were very happy with the result.
The project was then handed over to team O for testing purposes, but it did not work the way it was supposed to. Nothing was turning out to be near to what it was expected to do. All the work of the last 6 months turned out to be a waste of time and resources. And the terms between the two teams were also ruined.
To overcome such a mess in the business, DevOps came into the picture. If both the teams would have been collaborating from the commencement to the completion of the project, the scenario would have been different.
The isolation of both the teams from each other was resulting in slower delivery and less efficient products and services. This was the problem that companies started seeing especially as technology became more advanced. That’s when the concept of DevOps came to the fore and began being adopted widely.
DevOps is a merger of two terms Development and Operations. With the aim of cutting the life cycle of the system, the software development and IT operations are brought together. The motive is to keep delivering features or fixes or updates while keeping the business in line with its objectives.
The end goal of the DevOps process encourages collaboration and better communication within the two elements, thus maintaining an agile relationship.
Benefit of DevOps
A call to all the CTOs and CIOs of the business - To move ahead in the competitive market and become efficient in delivering the reliable and best features to the users DevOps is proving to be a boon.
The main purpose of DevOps is to remove the silos between the development and operations teams. With this concept of DevOps, both teams now work together across the application life cycle. To give you a better idea about the unsaid but deeply felt benefits, let me discuss the pros of DevOps.
Accelerated Innovation
The DevOps lets you provide faster and frequent delivery of the updates and features. DevOps holds the key to software innovation. It facilitates faster innovations and makes you efficient at driving business outputs. This will not only satisfy the customers but also help your business become strong in the market.
DevOps nurtures innovations and enables the teams to learn more and understand customer expectations better.
Collaboration
It takes a lot of effort to release new features or updates. The tension involved in the release of the new features and updates can hamper the stability of any workspace and hence degrade the overall performance and productivity. With the DevOps model both the teams - developers and operations - collaborate closely sharing the responsibility and combining their workflows to reduce the inefficiency and delay.
Reliability
With DevOps, any organization can improve its deployment and recovery time and can lower change failure rate. The practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure good quality of updates and infrastructure changes. It helps to ensure the reliability and stability of an application maintaining a great experience for the users.
Security
Another benefit of DevOps is - improved security. This is the time for DevSecOps, it takes care of the security of your apps. The best part of DevOps is that not only the security team but the whole team is responsible for the security. The DevSecOps helps you to track and detect security issues in the early stages. With constant iterative updates security of the application becomes easy.
Scalability
Scalability is one of the top priorities of every business as a business that can scale consistently is the one with great growth potential. The specialized practices in DevOps make it ideal to achieve the desired level of scalability. These practices include an opportunity for communication, increased innovation opportunities, and faster software release.
Different stakeholders of a business have different perspectives about DevOps. The CEO might look differently at DevOps as compared to CTOs or CIOs.
For CTOs or CIOs the focus is more on the strategic goals. From the point of view of a CTO or CIO, DevOps offer the following benefits -
- Individual improvement
- Cross-skilling
- Great flexibility and adaptability
- Freedom to experiment
- Increased engagement by team members
- Cooperative and happier teams
- Better process management
- Reliable and faster fixes
Summing Up
DevOps is no less than a boon for businesses and it helps the businesses do better with their processes and provide enhanced security to the customers.
Even if different stakeholders look at DevOps from different perspectives the key idea is to benefit the business in all possible ways.
