Businesses that haven’t implemented DevOps practices spend a longer time bringing products to market due to the complexity of the development process. Even companies that have implemented.
DevOps practices face challenges because of a lack of specialized expertise or because they are short on staff.
To take advantage of the benefits of DevOps processes, companies should work with a partner that has demonstrated technical proficiency and customer success applying DevOps best practices in the software development lifecycle (SDL).
Companies that use DevOps practices face three main difficulties. They experience disruptive and costly downtime because of the failure to carry out zero downtime deployments in which changes can be implemented while the application is running. These businesses tend to lack automation expertise for deployments and testing.
Some staff members at these companies may have knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), but IaC may not be part of the culture of the organization. IaC allows organizations to manage applications and data centers using machine-readable definition files instead of physical hardware.
Many of the issues organizations face with DevOps, come from skills gaps and the absence of required mechanisms and processes. DevOps cannot continue to function as a legacy operation.
Instead, companies need to take advantage of modern technologies, such as the cloud,containers, serverless architecture, and microservices.
Numerous companies that experience difficulties with DevOps processes don’t have post-deployment DevOps mechanisms in place. Preventative monitoring and alert mechanisms that define which events should be monitored, which tools to use, and what action should be taken when an event occurs may also be missing.
In-house staff members may not have any knowledge of DevOps philosophy and methodology.
Recently developed serverless technologies, such as AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate, introduce a new paradigm of which DevOps mechanisms teams should apply.
This lack of the proper knowledge base, tools, and processes means these companies take longer to develop products and bring them to market. The development process also ends up costing more, cutting into profits.
When DevOps mechanisms are carried out properly with the appropriate know-how, companies experience the advantages. Businesses benefit from a faster product feature development and time to market. Less downtime leads to improved user experience and business continuity, helping the organization maintain a positive reputation. Automated testing and code release get products to the market more quickly.
With automation expertise, organizations are more efficient, avoid errors, and experience fewer problems with deployment. Using automation for testing is a crucial part of quality assurance. With automation, companies can test for performance and security to prevent flawed products from entering the market.
To improve the development cycle, companies should work with a partner that has expertise in key areas related to DevOps practices. These areas include:
With Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), your company can rapidly and reliably build, test, and deploy your applications, reducing time to market while still improving quality.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enables companies to manage application configurations, containers, operating systems, and servers.
Configuration Management automates, monitors, designs, and manages configuration processes, allowing your organization to increase agility.
With Monitoring and Alert Automation, your company can analyze logs and automate performance monitoring of your applications and infrastructure.
Cloud services provide DevOps for any cloud service model to help move your business ahead,including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).
Your company should be able to build and deploy a microservices architecture using containers or serverless computing.
With a serverless architecture, your organization can build and run applications and services with increased agility, innovation, and productivity without thinking about servers or runtimes.
Working with an experienced partner will put your company on the right path to adopting DevOps and obtaining the benefits from day one. The first step is creating the proper mindset by understanding which business needs DevOps practices should address and that processes will need to change.
The partner should help your company establish baseline metrics so you can see progress over time. Starting with one application and building a DevOps team will help identify constraints and bottlenecks so an initial pipeline can be established.
Automating all tests that are run as part of the continuous integration process is critical. Your partner can help you automate at least some functional testing and nonfunctional tests associated with security, performance, and other quality characteristics to speed up these activities. Tools such as AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy use automation to improve efficiency.
When helping our customers, IO Connect follows a DevOps philosophy based on 4 principles:
Every organization will have a unique DevOps journey that is tied to its specific business and culture. That journey may be more about changing people’s habits and communication patterns than which tools the business uses for DevOps.
At IO Connect, we know that one size doesn’t fit all. That’s why we take a collaborative approach to helping customers along the path to DevOps adoption.
Our AWS DevOps Team delivers the practices and tools you need to improve your systems development cycle. We can provide continuous delivery and disaster recovery in case of disruptive events while ensuring high quality so your organization can be more efficient and productive.
IO Connect has achieved AWS DevOps Services Competency because we have demonstrated specialized technical proficiency and have a track record of customer success with specific focus on CI/CD, Monitoring, Logging, and Performance, Infrastructure as Code, Microservices and Containers, Serverless, and Configuration Management. This means we have all the expertise needed to ensure that your company reaps the benefits of DevOps practices.
Find out more about how we can help your company overcome DevOps practices challenges.
Reach out to IO Connect today.
