How DevOps Accelerates Your Execution Efficiency

The top goals that any software development team strives for are undoubtedly speed and quality. Speed is essential to gain an edge over slower competitors and to maintain customer engagement, while quality guarantees that your users receive the best possible experience with your software.

Unfortunately, pursuing both goals simultaneously can seem like an unattainable dream. A fast-paced development process may lead to neglecting certain stages and components of software development that are necessary to ensure optimal quality. Conversely, focusing on quality may require investing more time, which can hinder your ability to reach the market quickly.

Thus, when embarking on a new software development project, you may find yourself compelled to prioritize either speed or quality. Managing project development with DevOps practices and principles here can help you achieve the best of both worlds. DevOps consulting services can accelerate your execution efficiency and help achieve stability for the overall systems as well. Here, we will discuss the important areas of SDLC where DevOps implementation can bring you a balance between speed and quality and accelerate your execution efficiency.

1. Knowledge Management

DevOps achieves significant success over the past few years as it eliminates silos between teams. It promotes knowledge sharing and for this, it requires different teams to also work on project documentation that simplifies communication and collaboration between distributed teams. These documents serve the different needs of multiple consumers and use cases and enable them to deep dive into aspects of systems created by other teams to understand dependencies and begin from that point.

2. Software Configuration Management

To accelerate delivery through DevOps, it is important to correct old inconsistencies or challenges with configuration management. DevOps requires modern and collaborative workflow management in place to make the developer’s work easier. Henceforth, project management requires automating the manual processes to build in checks and redundancies, improving the potential for omissions due to human error and the accuracy of keeping assets in the desired state. If there is no automation, a system can be left with an obsolete version of software containing a known vulnerability if even one engineer forgets to update it. This vulnerability could be taken advantage of to distribute computer worms and install malware such as ransomware, or other similar malicious programs. Automation is valuable for another reason as well it greatly improves efficiency and makes configuration management of large systems manageable.

3. Build Management

The delivery processes are divided into two primary stages by DevOps: the creation of components and the release of the software. The types of tools that represent the DevOps infrastructure fall into those same categories: tools that manage the build processes and tools that manage the release process. Build management consists of tools that build, compile, package, and version code so that it can be redistributed as needed. In this process, the build manager also secures the code as it’s a proprietor of a business. It often combines the source repository, build console, and package repository. These tools enable an open culture of communication and collaboration critical for DevOps.

4. CI/CT/CD

Agile project development processes did a great job when it comes to the continuous integration of code. But DevOps consulting services also focuses on enabling continuous delivery as well as continuous deployment. It focuses on DORA metrics and enables organizations to achieve the highest DevOps level of implementation to sync quality and stability with speed in their execution pipeline. That’s where it emphasizes significantly integrating continuous testing in the CI/CD pipeline.

Continuous testing brings quality factors into the frequent releases. The true benefit of implementing CI/CD is only realized when automated testing is infused within the delivery and deployment pipeline. Continuous testing provides a continuous feedback mechanism that drives automated feedback at each checkpoint and indicates bugs or issues in the build. If there are no issues or bugs, then the process automatically moves to the next step in the delivery chain. If there is any blocker, the process gets stopped immediately, and corrective measures are taken. It ensures a more reliable and error-free integration and delivery pipeline ensuring higher productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

5. Release Management

With the abundance of web and cloud applications and their distributed nature, the need for release management discipline is rising. It focuses on syncing ongoing development, testing, the release of the applications, and ongoing support of application requirements. The release manager or project manager (often plays the role of release manager) focuses on managing, planning, scheduling, and controlling an entire software build through every stage and environment involved.

When DevOps is implemented in the release management cycle, it requires both developers and IT operations to collaborate from the beginning of the processes to the end. It encourages fewer, shorter feedback loops and faster releases without downtime or reducing the impact on customers. To achieve such a level of software deployment efficiency, accountability is shared between both developers and IT operations for the services they deliver, own their code, and take on-call responsibilities. Since both the team works collaboratively, also in on-call support, DevOps enables incidents to be detected and resolved faster — both during the release process and after.

6. Containerization Management

One of the reasons why DevOps implementation is successful and provides deployment speed is because of containerized applications which are lightweight and portable in any environment. With containerized applications comes the responsibility to manage them effectively since these applications got bigger over time in numbers and required to be maintained to ensure business continuity.

DevOps promotes the use of container management platforms or orchestration management tools such as Kubernetes. Orchestration management tools promote automated ways of developing, deploying, and managing container-based applications. These tools support the DevOps teams with a number of containerized application management processes, such as; governance, automation, layered security, extensibility, and enterprise support. Besides that, container management tools for example, Kubernetes support service discovery and load balancing, rollout and rollback automation, storage orchestration, and configuration management for containerized applications. With effective and integrated container management, IT admins easily keep their environments more secure, while developers enjoy the flexibility and ease of containers to develop and deploy new apps and services faster.

7. Cloud Provisioning Automation

DevOps consulting services also promotes the use of automation tools (orchestration, automation, and provisioning software) to automatically control the installation, configuration, and management of cloud computing services. These tools enable enterprises to make better decisions for their cloud computing resources. Cloud provisioning automation solutions can also be used for security and compliance, backups and storage, changes to settings and configurations, and more. Implementing automated provisioning the right way allows you to do automated patching, checks, and updates easily. DevOps promotes the use of IaC, allowing you to manage and maintain different environments, including development, testing, staging, and production in a single go. You can scale up existing systems as the operating landscape changes and respond to critical needs promptly whenever required.

8. Application Monitoring

Though DevOps focuses on the successful and fully automated deployment of software in the DevOps pipeline, it also brings in the responsibility to ensure that the application performs to its expectation in the live environment. For this, it encourages application monitoring or application performance monitoring.

Application performance monitoring helps the DevOps team figure out a way how to monitor a site in production and understand the problems, issues, and areas of improvement before the end users ever notice those issues. It helps the team identify how the end users interact with their business online and build or modify the applications in the right way for the customers. Before DevOps, it was the responsibility of the Operations team. But with DevOps implementation, siloed teams got removed and the development team also monitors the application performance and fixes issues if any occur. DevOps encourages application performance monitoring by using tools and by configuring the notifications and alarms in the logs to alert. Both processes are automated methods of application monitoring used with DevOps’s way of working.

Based on organization requirements, several metrics are collected and the tools used to collect them vary as well. Here are a few metrics among many often collected to ensure the good health and functioning of the applications:

• Failures, core dumps, error messages, and warnings
• Usage pattern
• Performance metrics
• Availability
• Scalability
• Custom telemetry, and others

9. DevSecOps

DevOps adoption and implementation is widely revolved around speed and quality, but what is also considered an effective and efficient execution strategy is ‘security’ as well. But in many organizations, security has been put as a siled function among automation, collaboration, short rapid development cycles, and increased deployment frequency. Over the past few years, the prevalence of software breaches has brought security to the forefront of IT priorities, resulting in its integration with the DevOps approach to operations. Security with DevOps known as DevSecOps where security is put to left to dev and ops.

It puts a renewed emphasis on security to detect and eradicate vulnerabilities early and often. It makes security everybody’s responsibility, from the business to development, QA, and operations. It automates security functions, removing obstacles to the goal of achieving security with speed. Security leaders work with developers in every step of the processes, not just at the end, the way traditional security approaches work. Although DevSecOps heavily depends on security leaders to provide expertise, it is a responsibility shared among all technology professionals involved in software delivery.

Final Words

DevOps addresses each and every aspect of the software development lifecycle. It conditioned people with new ways of working where shared responsibility, proactive collaboration, and communication are promoted. It encourages new processes and best practices for developing and deploying software applications. And top of that, each transition is supported by evolving programming languages, frameworks, integrations, platforms, and cloud-powered tools to support businesses maintain competitiveness in the market. By supporting people, processes, and technological advancements a company needs to be scalable, DevOps helps companies accelerate their execution strategy and speed to market efficiency.

Implementing DevOps and automating complete software development lifecycle is a time taking job that also requires hands-on implementation experience. Successive Digital is a leading DevOps consulting company that help you evaluate your current landscape of delivery and deployment and optimize processes based on your business objectives. If your need an expert DevOps consulting services, you can connect with us here.