DevOps - what is it?
The ongoing digitization of the business world presents companies with completely new challenges. Products have to be marketable faster and continuously improved, and they also have to meet the highest security standards. One answer to these new challenges is DevOps. We explain what this new approach entails in detail and how your team can also benefit from it.
DevOps
DevOps combines thinking, processes and technologies into a holistic approach that enables companies to develop, distribute and update applications and services. And do it faster, cheaper, and better than with traditional enterprise processes. This in turn leads to an optimized customer experience and thus to a competitive advantage.
The term is made up of the two words development and IT operations. This combination of names already shows what is so unique about the DevOps concept: Development and Operations no longer work separately from each other, but are combined in one team to streamline and optimize corporate processes. In addition, the areas of security and quality assurance can also cooperate closely with these new teams or even be fully integrated into them.
This requires not only an organizational realignment of the corporate structure, but also a new way of thinking and approaching employees and managers. In addition, new software tools and solutions are also used to apply the DevOps concept, which are primarily intended to automate previously time-consuming manual processes and enable team members to work more independently.
Why is DevOps so important?
DevOps has now become an industry standard for software companies. But why is the concept so important and successful? Ongoing digitization has forever changed our personal lives and the business world. Shopping, communication, and even driving - in almost all areas of the business world, software products have now become one of the most important success factors.
However, this trend has not only permanently changed perception and consumption, but also the speed at which customers expect new products or updates. This presents many companies with a dilemma. Due to ever-improving technologies, code and software solutions or updates can be developed faster today than ever before - the development department usually works efficiently enough.
However, the operations department often finds it difficult to test the new product or an update quickly enough and, above all, to evaluate the results and then pass them back to the development team. Thus, the competitive advantage of rapid development is lost.
At the same time, new problems must first be identified by Operations, evaluated and then forwarded to Development, where the developers can only start finding a solution with a time delay. By merging the areas of Development and Operations, precisely this bottleneck problem is solved.
DevOps: Game Changer in the IT Industry
DevOps has quickly become one of the most successful and popular processes in the IT industry. Due to the merging of roles and teams that were strictly separated in traditional structures, products can be delivered faster, easier and better - in other words, a real game changer.
DevOps offers your team the following benefits, among others:
- Shorter release and update cycles: DevOps enables your team to significantly shorten release and update cycles through increased efficiency. Shorter cycles also simplify planning reduces risk.
- Improved collaboration: By merging previously separate roles and teams, you ensure a continuous flow of information and a streamlined DevOps enterprise culture where ownership and communication are paramount.
- Security and reliability: By automating processes and eliminating interfaces between departments, you can further enhance the security, compliance, and reliability of your product.
- Better adaptation to the market: through improved efficiency and shortened update cycles, your team will be able to respond much better to new developments and trends in the market with the DevOps approach.
- Streamlined processes: By consolidating or automating many tasks with DevOps, processes and teams can be significantly streamlined.
Basis for success: the DevOps culture
As mentioned earlier, the success of the DevOps approach is based on merging traditional departments and processes into new teams. This requires a completely new corporate culture and an adjustment in the way team members think and plan. If old dividing lines within the company were to be overcome, for example, open communication is very important.
In addition, since all roles are involved, at least in part, in all phases, it is also important that each member of a DevOps team also feels responsible for the entire product or the performance of the team. Here, the engineer is just as jointly responsible for a failed deployment of the product as the operations manager is for poor development of the product.
The DevOps approach thus blurs the boundaries of responsibility within a team. At the same time, all team members have the same goal: to continuously improve the entire development and infrastructure lifecycle and thus the customer experience of a product. Furthermore, it is important to understand that DevOps is, at its core, a continuous pursuit of improvement, where there is no fixed goal or end to further development.
The most important DevOps methods
In addition to the right corporate culture, the efficient use of the appropriate methods and software tools is, of course, extremely important in order to be successful with the DevOps model.
These methods include, but are not limited to:
- Infrastructure in the form of code
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Delivery
- Continuous monitoring
- Microservices
- Agile Software Development