Devops (development and operations) is a type of agile relationship between Software Development and IT Operations supporting it
Most organisations producing software have, by now, implemented an agile development strategy. Their customers expect to have input, get frequent access to feature updates and witness rapid fixes for bugs. These customers want interfaces to continually improve without disruptive changes, and they don’t want to wait a year. To meet these expectations, software development operations need to be streamlined to maximum efficiency and code must be released continuously, and at a high frequency.
Devops removes some of the obstacles to software development efficiency. Breaking down the barriers between developers and operations, it applies the principles of agile development to processes and systems supporting software development. Developers gain speed and efficiency, and IT Ops maintain control over systems, and both deliver product faster to the satisfaction of their customers. Moving devops processes into the public cloud is the next step in dramatically streamlining the software development cycle, and helps to deliver greater efficiency sought by all.
1. Significant Cost Savings
After moving devops processes to public cloud, a lot less physical infrastructure is required. Development teams can grow without upfront investment. Since cloud infrastructure is shared, resources are pooled more efficiently. They are cost effective, only consumed resources are billed. Public cloud resources can provide flexible centralized access. Teams can be globally distributed, which helps solve geographic skills shortages which sometimes inhibit growth or increases costs. In a competitive market, these costs reductions are passed on to the customer.
2. Highly Flexible
Public cloud resources are software based and programmable. These characteristics make them instantaneous, reusable and disposable. When a resource is no longer required, it can be destroyed for an immediate cost saving. When needed, it can be restored instantaneously. Infinite copies can be made for horizontal scalability. Because cloud resources are programmable, a higher degree of control and automation is available via an API. Development teams can respond to changing customer needs and market conditions very rapidly by leveraging automation and the API hooks provided in the cloud service.
3. Automated Software Development
Writing code is actually a small phase in a larger process chain. A software development pipeline is a series of processes which controls and executes all phases in the development cycle. Each process element is triggered by the outcome of the preceding element in a linear fashion. Any task which fails can halt further progress and raise alerts or execute rollbacks. Pipelines provide visibility and reporting throughout all the tasks. They often have programmatic hooks which integrate with many existing third party tools software companies rely on for product management.
Fully automating the pipeline results in shorter release cycles by cutting wait times between phases. As a result of increased productivity, developers can generate more frequent releases. With fully automated testing, bugs can be uncovered sooner, and are less likely to pollute production releases. The resulting product is cleaner production code, much more feature rich due to its accelerated release cycle. The customer sees a rapidly evolving product with fewer issues.
Releasing code more frequently results in higher customer satisfaction. New Features are introduced more rapidly and bug-fixes are applied faster. Issues can be identified and addressed prior to deployment, reducing risk. The end result is a development ecosystem which is constantly producing great product for customers in a highly responsive manner. For the customer it means the software product will continue to have high value, be more adaptive to change, and ultimately be more reliable.
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