What Is DevOps and What Does It Mean for Your Business?

Although the term “DevOps” was coined fairly recently, the topics of development and operations have always been a concern for enterprises. Due to digital transformation recently taking the IT world by storm, this concern has been amplified. Companies have the need for speed in order to disrupt their markets or even just to remain competitive.

What is DevOps?

The term comes from an abbreviated compound of "development" + "operations."

In short, DevOps is a software development process that emphasizes communication and collaboration between product management, software development, and operations professionals.

This trending software development approach has many benefits - shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency and faster times to market.  In today's world, enterprises must stay abreast of customer needs, beat competitors to market, and constantly change direction when necessary.

How can DevOps help your company stay competitive?

Utilizing the DevOps approach will accelerate the delivery of new features to customers. The ability to quickly react to the changing needs and desires of customers boosts competitiveness and customer loyalty.

How can DevOps change the architecture of your company?

DevOps isn’t just a change for your development team. Committing to this new software development approach will fundamentally change the way your enterprise structures itself. It will also change the way your dev team communicates in many valuable ways. To produce deliverables in a short amount of time, your entire team will have to ramp up communication, collaboration, and innovation. Utilizing the DevOps approach will also alter areas including code management, configuration management, and processes.

Effective Code Management - Where development teams once threw together raw code and left the testing for a later date, DevOps implores developers to perform rapid integration testing regularly to reduce errors and speed the time to launch.

Rapid Processes - Frequent feedback loops are a key benefit of employing DevOps. When software developers are encouraged to quickly produce a minimal viable product, testing happens sooner and important feedback is sent back to the developers. Using the DevOps development approach, bug fixes happen quicker, features and changes are added, and new versions can be rolled out faster than ever before.

Prompt Configuration Management - Previously, testing components of code in different environments took a great deal of time. With the development of DevOps, companies now benefit from cloud vendors  - in particular, platform as a service (PaaS.) PaaS automatically provides the appropriate runtime container and middle-ware services for an application in a consistent environment across the application lifecycle, minimizes the costs of downtime and abstracts applications from infrastructure dependencies.

DevOps are essential to  digital transformation.

In this day of rapid IT transformation, your company will benefit from reinventing your IT architecture and incorporating DevOps into the landscape. In the age of agile development and easy access to immediate customer insights - companies are expected to deploy relevant programs and tweak applications at a quicker speed than ever before.  Being able to assess and quickly react to the changing needs of your customers will keep your enterprise relevant, valuable, and profitable.