Today, companies in all industries rely on software to meet customer and user demands. Besides, peoples’ expectations have changed dramatically in the last few years, as they demand instant, convenient and reliable access to services that are continuously improved – and those requirements are changing at a rapid pace. To meet these demands, you need to innovate faster than ever before. Rapid innovation, in turn, requires you to transform your business into an agiler software development organization if you want to remain competitive. Enter DevOps!
DevOps enables business transformation, but becoming agile is difficult
Switching to a DevOps model that facilitates continuous interaction between development and operations teams has become necessary to enable the rapid and continuous application delivery to meet the demands your users have now come to expect. However, getting there it’s not as easy as it sounds. While continuous application deployment through DevOps is increasingly becoming the new norm for businesses that want to thrive in today’s competitive markets, and automated frameworks can make it all much easier to keep up, there are many obstacles you will encounter along the journey to agile.
First, qualified DevOps engineers are notoriously hard to find. In fact, in a study conducted by Indeed.com last year, the role of DevOps engineer was rated the hardest of all IT jobs to fill in North America. That says a lot, considering the global IT talent shortage many companies are already grappling with. The talent shortage is due in large part to the high salaries qualified IT professionals demand that many companies simply can’t afford.
Second, moving to a DevOps model is not just about technology and skills – it requires a complete cultural change in your organization, from business management to human resources, and of course, on the development and operations teams. That, in and of itself, is a difficult and cumbersome feat. While DevOps will eventually free up time to innovate and create more business value, ironically, the effort it takes to implement new systems, technologies, and business processes can impede your ability to innovate and stay competitive in today’s fast-paced world.
Benefits of DevOps
The overall goal you should aim to achieve with DevOps is the continuous deployment of the best possible services and application features in a repeatable and agile manner. Some of the benefits include:
- Faster time-to-market: By using agile methods and automated frameworks, you can get applications and services or any changes to those to production much faster and ultimately increase ROI.
- Improved collaboration: By breaking down the barriers between traditionally siloed teams, you can improve business agility and make better decisions overall.
- Early detection: When development and operations teams are working together in a collaborative environment, faults or bugs can be detected and corrected more quickly. With consistent tracking and monitoring throughout the entire, ongoing lifecycle creates greater accountability.
- More time: Instead of constantly fighting fires, a collaborative, agile and automated environment gives everyone more time to innovate and create business value.
Why you should consider working with managed service providers through the DevOps journey
Managed service providers (MSPs) are in the business of IT transformation, and already have talented strategists and engineers on-hand that are consistently trained on the latest technologies, best practices and business processes. They can enable your organization to achieve rapid and continuous application and infrastructure deployment by breaking down the silos between business line owners, and development and operations teams; building best business practices and processes; and, implementing automated systems and development tools. In other words, MSPs can help you get written code into production in a fast and iterative manner and continuously improve applications and services at the pace your users expect. Most of all, by working with MSPs, you can enable your business to focus on what you do best – creating and delivering value.
We will be doing a series of blogs to help you understand the critical steps in your journey and how we can help enable you to be successful and limit your organizational and technical risk as you implement DevOps for your public and private cloud.
Contact Us now to discuss how we can work with your team to help define your DevOps roadmap.
Do check VegaStack – an end-to-end DevOps Management and Automation Tool.