In any manufacturing or services industry, it
is an established truth that the development of the product or the service
alone should not be the complete focus. The operational aspect of said product
or service is just as important and will be a crucial factor determining
profitability. These two components have co-existed in a pipelined manner where
the developers build from the ground up. The operations team takes it over from
there and pushes it into deployment, and handles maintenance. This ‘traditional’
architecture was a major bottleneck to companies, and this was especially
apparent in the IT industry.
The solution was to step out of this
compartmentalized structure and move into a more integrated approach. The roles
had to be redefined to be more collaborative and to ensure accountability
across sectors. Thus, the DevOps culture was born.
Identifying how this contributes to
alleviating the bottlenecks, major companies have embraced DevOps and made
significant headway through it, which further establishes the concept’s
validity. Therefore it is worthwhile to have an understanding of how this
architecture is practiced in steps.
Plan,
Identify, Track
Transparency is a key focus in any workflow if
you are striving to achieve effective collaboration. Hence, DevOps emphasizes
the need to plan out the task at hand clearly and execute it in a manner where
all stakeholders can get an idea of the state of the process. There is a
multitude of software platforms that have evolved specifically for this task,
and they offer the team the ability to manage their tasks while minimizing the
time spent briefing the stakeholders.
Develop
In contrast to the traditional System
Development Life Cycle (SDLC), where each stage was executed after its
predecessor, most stages are handled concurrently here. For example, the base
code of a software is developed initially, and improvements to it are made
while it is being tested for bugs. Version control systems enable the
developers to code and push new features to a base which will then be merged
seamlessly while the testing phase is running. This overlap of SDLC stages
saves valuable time for companies and enables products to be pushed out faster.
Deploy
The deployment of the product is not the final
stage of this process. Instead, this architecture focuses on continuous
deployment, where the deployment is automated upon the completion of quality
analysis.
Management
The data gathered by users after deployment
are carefully analyzed, and the necessary changes are made with the combined
effort of the entire team involved, including the original developers. This
enables faster and more reliable maintenance.
The stages may appear to be simple and easy to
implement. Still, current data and statistics indicate that even though many companies
have hastily started the DevOps implementation, the challenges it presents
become more apparent as the architecture is implemented. This requires more
fine-tuning of the process to fit into the company’s needs. Factors such as the
existing work culture may have to be taken into consideration in making these
adjustments. Eventually, it would be possible to iron out a model of DevOps
that suits the entire workflow, resulting in increased productivity
overall.
In an era where companies are competing on a
global scale, the smallest of productivity improvements could create major
shifts in profitability. DevOps arrives as an architectural solution for such
companies that aim to maximize their utilization of resources and avoid
redundancy and inefficiency. However, this is not a framework that has been
ironed out to fit any and all situations perfectly and therefore requires a
good deal of fine-tuning on the part of the implementer. If perfected, the
results can be significant, and this has been proven by not only small tech
startups but from tech giants such as Amazon and Facebook.
Especially with the world recovering from a
pandemic crisis, most institutions are on the lookout for a fresh start to
their proceedings. The term ‘DevOps’ has been commonplace among them due to the
popularity this architecture has garnered over its few years of implementation.
If you are one of these managers who are looking for ways to take your
organization to the next level and stand out from the competition, DevOps might
well be worth investigating!
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