How Can Integrating DevOps Philosophy Help Your Business?
Implementing DevOps methodologies to your workflows can create a lot of positive change for your business.
DevOps can improve your infrastructure and change your company culture by encouraging collaboration and allowing for more flexibility and less dependency between teams.
The truth is many companies are resistant to implementing DevOps because it's a significant change in how they operate.
It can take time and strategic effort to get everyone at your company to adopt the DevOps philosophy as their operation standard. But the effort is well worth it.
This article dives into the impact of integrating a DevOps philosophy into your business.
What Is DevOps Philosophy?
DevOps philosophy starts by understanding DevOps methodologies, which combine the work of development and operations in order to remove dependencies and allow for faster, more accurate deployment of code and greater visibility into the infrastructures being managed by all members of the team.
Implementing the DevOps approach also allows you to receive more feedback with a faster response time, which can create a better user experience.
One of the main focuses of the DevOps philosophy is automation.
Taking advantage of automation and configuration management allows you to reduce the time from development to market while minimizing errors.
The idea behind DevOps is that your DevOps team can become self-servicing, removing many of the barriers to implementation quickly and easily while making complex changes simpler and less risky for all members of your team.
At its core, the DevOps philosophy is about using systems to optimize workflows and enable continuous delivery and continuous deployment, which allows for continuous improvement, better collaboration, and reducing friction in the software development lifecycle as you launch new code or products.
What Is DevOps Culture?
DevOps culture emphasizes a lot of factors that aren't common in traditional software development.
A major aspect of DevOps culture and the DevOps lifecycle is the collaboration between development and operations teams.
In a traditional software development environment, there can be a divide between operation and development teams.
DevOps softens this divide through shared responsibility, combined workflows, shared goals, automation, and visibility.
The idea is to use DevOps systems to make the process more self-service, allowing operations teams to deploy code without the help of a developer.
The role of a developer also shifts away from fulfilling requests from operations.
What Is the Impact of Implementing DevOps Philosophy?
Using DevOps to improve your infrastructure can completely revolutionize your development processes.
There are many different benefits that a DevOps model offers that can improve not only your business but also your company culture and how teams interact with each other.
a. Transforming Business Culture
The right DevOps processes allow for team autonomy and remove dependencies between teams.
Your teams are able to work independently and based on their own needs and flow, allowing for high-speed production because your team can work in the way that suits them.
Reducing constraints allows your teams to work more efficiently and bring more creativity to their work to solve problems with support from your infrastructure.
Trust and transparency are important tenets of DevOps teams.
Successful implementation and use of DevOps relies on communication between teams and encourages collaboration.
With improved workflows between teams, the focus of work can shift from managing and dealing with issues between teams and troubleshooting issues that arise to improving the customer experience and working towards business goals independently.
Keep in mind, an outside consulting company can implement changes faster and easier than having your team work on their own because we've helped many companies make the transition before.
E.g., OpSourced DevOps engineers have experience working with all different types of infrastructures and can get your systems up and running all while adhering to the latest best practices.
b. Speeding Up Development and Delivery
Continuous feedback is a vital feature of DevOps culture that benefits your company more than just in production.
Receiving continuous feedback helps to improve the customer experience and produce better products.
With continuous feedback, you can quickly deploy new features and resolve any issues that may occur more rapidly.
Automation is another major cultural focus of DevOps.
Implementing automation allows for improved productivity and rapid development and deployment.
This means that your system can be more readily available and accessible, and improvements can be deployed faster.
c. Reducing Risks and Failures
Using automated testing and continuous monitoring as a standard in your infrastructure can help reduce business risks or potential points of failure.
The continuous monitoring aspect of DevOps allows you to identify and resolve issues early in the development process instead of down the road, where they could have a larger impact on your infrastructure.
Continuous testing in DevOps allows code to be tested as it is written before it's implemented.
You will be able to catch any errors early and avoid issues that could create service disruptions. DevOps also focuses on iterative software development, that is, continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
CI/CD allows for frequent smaller updates to your infrastructure as opposed to one major update.
Taking advantage of this option can help minimize downtime as you improve your infrastructure.
d. Cost-efficiency and Resource Optimization
Using the DevOps philosophy that focuses on collaboration and automation can affect your development and operational processes.
DevOps implementation allows you to look at how these processes happen and eliminate unnecessary steps so your development and operations processes can be streamlined to operate as efficiently as possible.
Taking advantage of available automation allows your team to more safely offload manual and repetitive tasks, too.
Using DevOps in your infrastructure can remove the need for any of your team members to complete these tasks themselves, which frees them up to work on other tasks.
Cloud-based infrastructure can provide many benefits on its own.
Combining cloud-based infrastructure services with DevOps allows you to take advantage of scalable and flexible resources that can meet your needs while being cost-effective.
What Are the Potential Roadblocks To Integrating DevOps Philosophy?
Implementing DevOps systems can create a major cultural shift in your organization's operations.
This could be a source of some initial friction from your team members when DevOps integration is brought up or in the initial stages of implementation.
It's important to emphasize to your team all of the benefits that DevOps will have to your business and your infrastructure, as well as their own lives and work.
DevOps implementations encourage communication between teams.
As communication increases between teams that don't frequently communicate, there is a potential for initial communication breakdown and tension.
Before teams start collaborating, it may be a good idea to address potential communication issues and create strategies for communication channels and for sharing responsibilities.
Your team may be worried about integrating DevOps philosophy into your business because of skill gaps they may need to fill in the new DevOps environment.
Finding the time to provide the relevant training and learning opportunities to bridge any skill gaps can be challenging.
When you work with OpSourced, our DevOps engineers can help train your team members on any skill gaps as part of our consulting services.
Security and compliance concerns are something else that we commonly see when talking about implementing DevOps practices.
We make sure to include industry-standard security measures in all infrastructures we work on.
Our engineers are specially trained to meet any other compliance requirements your business may have.
What Can We Expect After Integrating DevOps Philosophy?
Integrating the DevOps philosophy may create a transition period as your employees get used to working with your new system.
It's important to be patient during this adjustment period.
Once your employees get used to the new system, they can start benefiting from it and working more efficiently.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is DevOps philosophy?
At its core, the DevOps philosophy is about using systems to optimize workflows, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, which allows for continuous improvement, better collaboration, and reducing friction in the software development lifecycle as you launch new code or products.
What are the key pillars of DevOps philosophy?
The DevOps philosophy is built upon the following key pillars: collaboration and communication, automation, CI/CD, customer feedback and iterative development, infrastructure as code, monitoring and logging, and security and compliance.
In Closing
As part of our DevOps Consulting Services, we will help train your team on how to use the new system to minimize the adjustment period as much as possible.
As your team learns how to use your new DevOps workflows, you will see the benefits of increased communication and collaboration in your improved product quality and system reliability.
DevOps culture can also improve the quality of life for your team by reducing friction in their work, helping to improve employee retention for key team members.
Integrating DevOps philosophy into your infrastructure can help your business be more agile and give you a competitive advantage.
You'll be better equipped to identify and remedy challenges and roadblocks as they arise.
When you work with OpSourced, our DevOps engineers will work to train your teams to make sure that they understand the changes to your infrastructure and that the changes fit their needs.
We can even work with you after the initial implementation process through our Managed DevOps Services, where we handle all of the operational responsibility of your infrastructure.
This allows your team to get all of the benefits of DevOps culture without adding infrastructure management responsibilities to their workload.
Integrating the DevOps philosophy can provide a lot of benefits to businesses, and working with an outsourced DevOps provider only makes it easier for you to access those benefits.
Working with a consulting company to implement DevOps and software development methodologies can help improve your business without your team having to take time away from their other work.
Business can continue as usual until all of the benefits of DevOps are ready to be implemented.
Are you ready to improve your business? Contact OpSourced today to schedule a consultation to discuss how we can help you achieve all of your DevOps goals.