Rapidly changing customer requirements and a high level of competition compel companies to enhance lead time and flexibility. DevOps implementation helps them with it by marrying development, operations, security and business departments and making them serve the same goals. According to the research, DevOps increases deployment frequency by 200 times and reduces the time wasted on unplanned work by 22%. What is DevOps that has recently evolved in BizDevOps and does it improve business efficiency? Let’s find it out!
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What Is DevOps and BizDevOps?
The DevOps methodology was born in 2008 when the urge for Agile development demanded a technique that brings together and harmonizes development and operation teams, “dev” and “ops”, respectively. Later, business — “biz” — has come on board, which has led to the emergence of BizDevOps.
When it comes to DevOps definition, the phenomenon can be explained in numerous ways, and all of them refer to the essence of the concept. It’s based on the following principles:
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery
- Continuous deployment
DevOps is a development methodology that is based on agile development, automation and strong partnership between all teams that accomplish intermixed functions and are equally responsible for the performance and business value of the end product.
DevOps is not only about software development tools or techniques — it’s about the general culture of seamless communication and collaboration within a company.
Quite frequently, DevOps and Agile are considered as interchangeable notions, but they are not: DevOps focuses on organizational changes, while Agile requires a shift in mindset and practical aspects. Agile divides teams into separate groups and doesn’t provide shared ownership of the product. As opposed to Agile, DevOps blurs barriers between devs and ops and demands one cross-functional team to perform all phases of the development process.
Quite a new phenomenon, BizDevOps, or DevOps 2.0 is purposed to synchronize development and operations teams with business goals so that the entire organization responds quickly and flexibly to existing market demands, customer expectations and company objectives.
Benefits of DevOps Implementation
To understand the benefits of DevOps implementation, we need to look into the challenges it addresses:
- Siloed development and operation teams, which is why they are unaware of the bottlenecks with which the other department deals.
- Operation teams hardly understand the domain specifics, which may nullify developers’ efforts on meeting the industry requirements.
- Teams have different goals, which may cause a lack of understanding and low efficiency.
Even though this approach seems to lack clear-cut role division, a well-structured DevOps team helps increase productivity and performance.
Enhanced Engagement and Collaboration
In a DevOps-based organization, employees adhere to the system thinking, which means they work within a culture of shared responsibility, transparency and quick feedback. These factors are the foundation of mutual understanding, trust and, consequently, effective collaboration.
Also, the methodology encourages industry-specific knowledge, as both devs and ops are equally up to speed on the domain’s ins and outs.
Increased Performance
During a traditional software development project, several isolated teams handle a ready piece of code, which may compromise software performance.
Teams that practice DevOps launch releases more frequently, which enables more dynamic development processes, reduces rework time, error rate and release failures, decreases the time for system recovery, prevents serious downtimes and improves time to market.
Improved Customer Experience
DevOps gears up software development, making it possible to respond promptly to changing market conditions and customer requirements. Open interaction provided by the collaboration philosophy shortens production cycles and improves time to market.
Customer requirements may frequently change, and teams must be flexible enough to align development with new objectives on the fly, and the methodology provides such flexibility.
DevOps Implementation Best Practices
The transformation of traditional organizations into collaborative teams is a long journey that requires a well-thought-out DevOps implementation strategy. There’re three stages of DevOps implementation that help companies achieve smoother operations and higher efficiency.
Focus on Needs
The process should begin with an understanding of company and customer needs, which is why DevOps implementation roadmap should be justified by business requirements. Also, all shareholders should agree with the coming changes and be ready to adopt a new culture.
Business needs should align with customer requirements, such as expectations regarding release frequency, time-to-market, functionality and performance. That’s why companies should put their customers and their ever-changing demands at the center of the process.
No Barriers
The very essence of DevOps is cooperation, that’s why there should be no barriers among employees —both physical and moral. Mutual training courses and thematic meetings for developers, QA engineers, business analysts help pull the team together as they foster the culture of synergetic cooperation.
However, the lack of required skills may complicate the adoption. The way to overcome it is by hiring a consultant to manage teams and teach them to communicate with each other, building a culture of interaction with common goals. Another option — DevOps managed services.
Proper Tools and Common Infrastructure
Automation is the main enabler of quick development, and faster execution is one of the core goals of the philosophy. Automated tools and advanced technologies facilitate the following project stages:
- Coding: tools for code creation, analysis, merger and version control
- Building: tools for continuous integration and status monitoring
- Testing: instruments for continuous testing
- Packaging: an application artifact repository
- Release: tools for modification management, release automation and legal approval
- Configuration: instruments for infrastructure configuration and management, infrastructure as a code
- Monitoring: tools for application performance and end-user feedback monitoring
The choice of DevOps tools should be based on their compatibility with the environment and with each other as they build a common infrastructure that helps reduce conflicts and eliminate occasional bugs. At the same time, microservices help create a common infrastructure out of numerous apps and services deployed in isolated environments.
Aligning Business and IT
Companies that decide on DevOps or BizDevOps as a centerpiece of their IT systems enjoy a balance between high-quality software, quick delivery of new features and meeting business requirements. Indeed, enterprise DevOps enables the efficient combination of the principles of continuous development and integration with the shared code and automated deployment that is guided by the company’s high-level objectives.
We at SaM Solutions set a high value on bringing together business, development and operations, especially AWS DevOps services, as their combination allows companies to get incredible cultural, technical and business benefits. To make the best use of DevOps best practices, we have built SaM CloudBOX PaaS — a ready-to-use development framework that helps businesses streamline their projects.
To learn more about the benefits that the development methodology can provide to your business, contact our experts!