What DevOps is and how it contributes to the Digital Transformation

We live in a Digital Transformed world, where technology allows new forms of work in a high speed changing environment. Traditional businesses are challenged by start-ups and tech companies, with innovative and disrupting business models. New apps and services are created and become obsolete in a blink of an eye. This new generation of consumers has the power of choice on their hand since they are kids. COVID-19 brought a new normal to the way we live putting companies under pressure to change or die, and the technology is the great lever, even though at the same time create new challenges.

In this scenario, every day new ideas and insights come from innovators and are almost immediately copied by followers to become the new reality with innovations on top of it, creating a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement also new ways of doing things. Mobile, apps, tablets, and the internet of things are just the tools to live in the new normal.

The time between coming up with ideas or insights and its materialisation has to be shorter than ever before. Otherwise, the momentum is lost while competitors are winning space. When consumers face errors and problems using the new technologies, the users don’t come back, and that can bring a company to lose its lead

Challenges and solutions to the new tech

In order to respond to this fast speed, connected world, the traditional development, test, production and operation models does not fit anymore, creating bottlenecks and friction when speaking of the relationship among teams. Each of the technology areas ends up becoming a silo with strict interaction rules.

At one side of the ring, we got development, trying to answer in its best, in a faster way, the business insights, using agile methodologies, modern architectures and languages. On the other corner, IT operations, in a quest for stability and control for the production environments, creating processes and procedures to ensure that every piece of code released to production would be stable in order to avoid incidents, not forgetting to protect what is already running.

This enormous abyss between Development and Operations brings titanous clashes, slowing down the delivery time and problem resolution.
To reduce the friction also allow business ideas to become features to service consumers, the DevOps concept was forged around 2010; a concept that grew and, during the last years, are helping to change the IT landscape.

DevOps: concepts advantages

It is hard to find a unique definition for DevOps, as sometimes the market is looking at this matter as a group of blind men trying to see an elephant with their hands. Each one touches a different part and have a different view of it.

First of all, DevOps is a work culture, bringing software development near IT operations, closing the gap between those areas and harvesting the fruits of this gathering.

DevOps is not a methodology or a tool, but it’s a set of practices, built on top of automation, communication and shared objectives, changing organisational cultures to bringing to life a new way to deliver IT. DevOps includes the whole Design, Build and Operate IT lifecycle, unifying these processes with governance and security serving as its basis, sewed up with automation, on an agile way of work.

In order to ensure that the business is aligned to this new industrial revolution, with today’s fast information consumption society and, consequently, to the Digital Transformation, there is a pressing need for organisational changes; a big change, of course, that embraces much more than the IT department in itself and even more than the Operations and Development relationship, creating an arc from the business to the consumer.
Therefore, IT tends to be seen not only as a support area and more like a part of the business.

This concept disruption is enormous, as silos must be broken, communication plans must be clear, concise and need to be followed and it is necessary to stop looking just to task executors and starting to see the whole service. When the business starts a more holistic approach to the development, test, production and operation cycle, without barriers between them, they will be, almost automatically, a DevOps business.

At DNX Solutions, we work to bring a better cloud and application experience for digital-native startups in Australia.

Our current focus areas are AWS, Well-Architected Solutions, Containers, ECS, Kubernetes, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery and Service Mesh and Data Solutions (movement, transformation, lakes, warehouses and analytics). We are constantly hiring cloud engineers for our Sydney office, focusing on cloud-native concepts.

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