What is DevOps and Why Should You Adopt its Approach?
If you work in a tech team, you may have heard the term ‘DevOps’ and even listened to respected colleagues or industry figures talking passionately in favour of it. But just what is DevOps and how does it work?
In this post, we’ll explain the term and benefits of adopting DevOps in your workplace.
What is DevOps in simple terms?
There are two areas of tech in any IT-based business that need to work together with a reasonable degree of harmony in order to be efficient. On the development side, you have the team that writes the code and creates the software your enterprise uses. On the other hand, you have the operational team that manages the tech systems which use that software.
In simple terms, DevOps is a way of working that allows the development and operations functions to work together in one symbiotic, virtuous circle – rather than operating as two distinct silos, sometimes at odds with each other. It can be seen as an approach or as an entire culture, but either way, DevOps is designed to improve efficiency in every part of the software development life cycle.
Why you should implement DevOps
There are many significant benefits of adopting a DevOps approach in your business, including…
1. Faster software delivery and changes
The first reason why you should implement DevOps is based on speed. DevOps evolved from the Agile software delivery method, which means it’s capable of bringing software to market considerably faster than the old-style “waterfall” software approach. Because teams work together in shorter sprints, the software can be created quickly and issues like bugs and glitches can be ironed out quicker.
2. Improved cross-team collaboration
We mentioned teams working together directly above, and that’s another of the benefits of adopting DevOps. Where older approaches to software development and IT operations saw those two distinct teams working in silos, the DevOps approach sees them working side by side to develop, test and release software, then see how it works in situ within company networks before iterating on it some more.
In fact, the end-to-end DevOps process looks like this:
Development
1. Plan software
2. Code
3. Build
4. Test
Operations
1. Release
2. Deploy
3. Operate
4. Monitor…
… before looping back around to planning further additions to said software based on the ops team’s monitoring phase. All of which contributes to an improved service delivery that makes the lives of everyone at your company considerably easier.
3. Increased security
Another of the benefits of adopting DevOps is that it allows for a continuous security testing approach which ultimately makes for more secure software and networks.
Continuous security testing sees a DevOps team constantly monitoring for security threats and working quickly to address vulnerabilities – across both software development, and the company’s IT infrastructure.
This has many benefits, as you can see in our post ‘Why Continuous Software Security Checks Are Important.’
4. Huge potential for automation
Following directly on from security is the potential to automate many areas of the testing process as well as other potentially repetitive tasks. This can be a huge time-saver, freeing up both software developers and your IT team to focus on other important tasks across the breadth of the continuous development pipeline. Not only can this save your existing staff time, it can contribute to shortening dev cycles and even help you to keep headcount low, allowing you to invest in other areas of the business, like improving your IT hardware or purchasing additional software licenses.
5. Greater innovation
All of the above contributes to arguably the biggest benefit of adopting DevOps. With automation leading to more time and cross-team collaboration leading to better service delivery, a dev team is free to create more advanced, innovative software that solves a business’s problems in all kinds of unexpected ways. Likewise, by working with your ops team, they can design it to suit the specific limitations or quirks of existing legacy software and hardware, meaning DevOps can help you get more from older systems for longer – or allow you to truly transform digitally with bespoke solutions designed to propel your business into an exciting future.
Do you need to adopt a DevOps culture in your company?
At One Beyond, we not only create bespoke software to help enterprises of all kinds, we also offer a Continuous Delivery Teams service with trained tech professionals who are used to working with a DevOps approach. So whether you need externally-created solutions, or team members to help you establish your DevOps best practices, we can help.
Get in touch today to find out how we can help you.
