Blog Tag: DevOps Cycle

Are you looking for ways to automate application development? Do you want to reduce costs while improving the quality of the apps? One of the best ways to do this is to use DevOps to deliver functionality at high velocity. Brands across different industries such as Frontier, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Capital One, and others employ a DevOps model to gain a competitive advantage. 

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices that include Development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) and it involves a mix of processes such as software development, enhanced collaboration, automation, QA, continuous integration, testing, and other IT operations. DevOps helps to improve quality operational productivity, and revenues. 

When the dev and ops teams work together, they can build the apps faster, deploy them quickly, and make changes without any disruption. 

1. Higher Collaboration between the Teams 

Nowadays, development teams need to break down their internal silos and collaborate with their peers in today’s dynamic environment. The alignment of development and operations teams works on a set of specific goals to speed up the processes and deliver favorable outcomes. As all the members working on the project are responsible and accountable for meeting the quality and timeliness of deliverables, it ensures a smooth workflow. 

2. Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery 

The most important aspect that drives the advantages of DevOps is referred to as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. As DevOps automates the business processes, it helps in faster delivery with continuity of releases, enhanced efficiency, and quality. It also provides simplicity of development and deployment processes. With DevOps, enterprises can improve their deployment frequency by 200x and recovery times by 20x.

3. Improved Customer Experience 

DevOps is known for deepening customer engagement by creating useful applications in a responsive manner. We all know that customer satisfaction is something that can make or break your business. It is important for your business to win new customers and retain the existing ones. Your applications would perform flawlessly and so, your enterprise can reap the benefits of greater client satisfaction by employing DevOps within your organization.

4. Cost Savings 

DevOps initiatives create innovations that add value to your business. It also helps you save money on the development, maintenance, and upgrades. A complete DevOps strategy can help to save a lot of money and boost profitability also. As DevOps facilitates faster delivery, it is known for reducing overall costs. 

5. Reduced Deployment Failures and Rollbacks

Programming defects may lead to deployment failures during web or mobile app development. Shorter development cycles can help to spot the code effects and reduce the risks of failure as we use the Agile approach to promote frequent code releases. When the development and operations teams work together, exchanging ideas and feedback becomes easier. It is easier to manage rollbacks as only a few modules may require changes. 

6. Faster Delivery Time 

DevOps works on main principles like automation, continuous delivery, and a quick feedback cycle. It aims to make software development faster. With DevOps, you can expect faster delivery without compromising the quality or security of software. As small deliveries are faster and take less time to deploy, users can enjoy faster time to market. The rollbacks and debugging also gets faster with DevOps.

7. Customer Satisfaction

DevOps enables frequent delivery of updates that ultimately drives customer satisfaction. Shorter release cycles involve testing the different versions of the product at multiple stages resulting in a flawless product. With a reduction in errors through DevOps, customers become satisfied and happy. In a nutshell, DevOps leads to enhanced customer satisfaction. 

How to incorporate DevOps in your organization?

A lot of businesses are switching to DevOps to overcome the challenges and make their business grow. DevOps is a transformative journey in the IT world. If you are finding it difficult to get started with DevOps, we have listed down some of the steps that can make the process easier for you:

1. Evaluate your business requirements 

Before you adopt DevOps, identify your business needs and figure out what you want to achieve with DevOps. Ask yourself: ‘Why should I switch to DevOps?’ or ‘How can my business benefit from DevOps?’ You cannot just incorporate a new technology into your business only because that is the latest trend in the market. You should identify your business goals and find out whether it will be fruitful to adopt DevOps. 

2. Discuss internally 

It is important to talk to your peers and all the employees so that they are aware of the changes within the organization. All the stakeholders should at least be informed about the new models. They should be explained what advantages will DevOps have for the business processes and how it will be a game-changer for your business. As DevOps involves breaking down the project into silos and requires a collaborative approach, it is important to convince the teams to adopt this new model and bid goodbye to the old and traditional approaches. 

3. Track the progress

You cannot implement DevOps and then sit back to wait for the results. It is important to gauge the success of DevOps and make changes if required. You should measure the metrics of different stages on a regular basis and identify what works for you and what does not. 

4. Encourage Collaboration 

There’s no doubt that DevOps facilitate seamless and smooth collaboration between different teams. You should focus on providing the right paths for easy communication between the employees so that they can share the information and cooperate with each other. 

5. Start Small 

There’s no need to try to automate everything at once. Remember that DevOps cannot happen overnight and so, rushing to make the changes may not be a good idea. It is always safe to start small and then scale up the operations by incorporating the right strategies that contribute towards business success. 

6. Pick the right tools

It is important to invest in the right tools of automation that enhance the functioning of your existing business environment. You can hire professional experts to help you make the right decision for buying tools for smooth operations. 

7. Focus on continuous integration and delivery

DevOps establishes continuity in integration and delivery and ensures smooth operations for your business. Continuous integration is a part of Agile methodology. As software is developed in smaller chunks, the errors can be corrected and flawless products can be delivered. 

8. Enhance security 

Strengthening security is a crucial step that can make DevOps ineffective. You may have to integrate security systems or security teams to monitor the infrastructure and configuration. You can hire a team to manage the security of the systems. 

Transforming to DevOps may not be as easy task as it seems, but using the right steps can surely help you. You can hire a DevOps engineer to make the transition faster and smoother. Teams who fully embrace DevOps work smarter and faster. They can surely deliver better outcomes to their customers.  Reach our experts now for a free consultation. You can call us at +1 408-400-3737 or drop an email at: contact@topsinfosolutions.com

Did you know? Your slow loading web page can give your users a heart attack and, potentially, kill them? You might not have heard a statement weirder than this but a study into effects of web performance on stress by Ericsson suggests otherwise: “The stress caused by web delays is comparable to watching a horror movie.” Yes, people have had suffered fatal cardiac arrests while watching even mildly intimidating movies like Jaws and Twilight. With DevOps evolving from niche to mainstream strategies in global organizations, the modern CDNs have no choice but to keep up.

Nevertheless, there is more to DevOps than faster CDNs and prevention of heart attacks. Before we dig more into DevOps, its implementation, and avenues of business growth, let’s look at how DevOps works.

How DevOps Works?

DevOps, as the name sounds, brings two essential part of your IT business operations: Development and Operations into a single umbrella. At times, the single umbrella could be a single team with common goals, a team where software engineers take care of every stage of entire application lifecycle—development, testing, deployment, and, of course, operations. As a result, they develop many skills.

Some organizations push their DevOps models to its limits. DevOps models at Airbnb and ByteDance include quality assurance and security teams too, making way for DevSecOps.

These teams working together bring many new practices in your business flow to make way for automation. Automation makes way for rapid business growth by cutting manual and slow business processes. DevOps makes organizations use a technology stack that allow them to operate and evolve applications rapidly and consistently. The technologies also aid engineers individually achieve tasks that generally would have required help from other teams, and this further increases the team’s velocity. However, DevOps in real-world scenarios is much more complicated than simple, aforementioned, definitions.

The Six Cs of the DevOps Cycle

In 2019, the change is going to take place from just a CI pipelines to DevOps assembly lines. The implementation of DevOps in an organization revolves around seven Cs. CI stands for ‘Continuous Integration’ and one of the seven Cs of DevOps cycle. There are 6 more as shown in the figure above

• Continuous Business Planning

The very first step of DevOps Cycle, continuous business planning revolves around finding potential avenues of growth in your business, pinpointing the skills required, fixing outcomes of decisions and resources required.

• Collaborative Development

Collaborative Development involves designing a sketch plan and programming for development to start with.

• Continuous Integration

CI is a development practice where software developers regularly merge their code modifications into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run.

• Continuous Testing

This stage of the DevOps lifecycle increase the efficiency of the organisation by continuously performing unit and integration testing.

• Continuous Monitoring

For an organization to work properly there is a need of constant monitoring. This stage includes monitoring changes and any errors or mistakes whenever it happens.

• Continuous Release and Deployment

This stage includes monitoring release process and deployment procedures. This stage helps to implement reviews of codes and developers check-ins as well.

• Collaborative Customer Feedback & Optimization

Feedbacks from customers are an important part of the life cycle, it enables to determine whether your DevOps services are up to mark or not. It helps to take modification decisions. It also allows you to optimize entire process as well.

DevOps Opens New Avenues of Business Growth

High-performing organizations that commendably utilize DevOps principles run 46x more frequent software deployments than their competitors, 96x faster recovery from failures, 440x faster lead time for changes, Higher levels of customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, 2x as likely as low performers to achieve reported goals across financial and non-financial measures, according to 2018 State of DevOps Report.

1. Make way for higher velocity

Implementing DevOps moves your organization at a faster rate so that you bring customer innovations faster, adapt to market conditions better, and raise your efficiency in driving business results. The DevOps model allows your developers and operations teams to work together and accomplish those goals. For instance, microservices and continuous delivery allow teams to takeover possession of services and then issue updates to them faster.

2. Raise the frequency of delivery

DevOps raises the frequency of software releases so that you can transform and improve your product quicker. The faster you can issue new features and security and bug fixes, the sooner you can reply to your customers’ requirements and take a competitive advantage. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are DevOps practices that automate the release of software processes, from development to deployment.

3. Uphold positive user experience

By implementing DevOps models, you ensure the eminence of application updates and infrastructure vicissitudes, which appreciates rate of deliver to be at a more rapid pace and upholding a positive user experience. Your DevOps team can employ practices like continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to test each amendment for functional integrity and safety procedures. With the right DevOps tools, you can monitor and log practices to stay at the top of performance and leverage on real-time data.

4. Automation consistency

If you want to operate your infrastructure and development processes at scale, automation consistency helps you run multifaceted or varying systems resourcefully and with condensed risk. For instance, infrastructure as code supports management of your development, testing, and production settings in a repeatable and well-organized method.

5. Improve collaboration

If DevOps is a part of your cultural DNA, you can instate operational teams underneath a DevOps cultural model, which accentuates morals such as ownership and culpability. When developers and operations teams work together towards the common goal—delivery, they share accountabilities and syndicate their workflow to streamline business processes. Improved collaboration condenses disorganizations, saves time and money, and accelerates business growth. For instance, reduced period transference between developers and operations and coding are dependent on the run-time environment.

6. Be compliant with DevSecOps

DevSecOps is a superset of DevOps and includes security in addition to development and operations. DevSecOps model allows you to move rapidly while keeping control and adhering to compliance and best security practices. You can implement a DevSecOps model without the usual hassles by using automated compliance guidelines, fine-tune controls, and configuration management methods. For instance, using infrastructure and policy–as code, you can state and then track compliance at scale.

The Future is DevOps, Are You Ready?

Software and the Internet have redefined the businesses around us and the industries that run those business; from shopping to show business to finance. Software has moved from a mere business tool to an integral component on which modern businesses run on. Companies communicate with their clientele through software delivered as a service or application on every device they use. In addition, they employ software to appraise operational competences by reinventing every part of the value chain: logistics, communications, or operations.

DevOps at TOPS Infosolutions

DevOps model relies on effective tooling to help teams rapidly and reliably deploy and innovate solutions for their customers. These tools automate manual tasks, improve our teams’ ability to operate in complex, scalable environments, and keep them in charge of the high velocity that DevOps enable.

Every organization is unique and for a majority, the DevOps journey is not straightforward. There are many pauses and commas along the path, which may contain early momentum and lead to chaos. Without a directed path forward, your organizations will struggle to scale their DevOps success beyond isolated teams.

Our DevOps team with vast experience will get you back on track and unchain the momentum. DevOps is an everlasting evolution, and it lacks a destination. Nevertheless, we have found ways to achieve success faster and we have identified the six of them.