The previous decade was entirely dedicated to the emergence of new technologies revolving around social media and startup culture. With time, we started to witness changes in the way technology was being utilized comparedto previous decade. There was much more reliance on technology with the penetration of smartphones. And with wider penetration, enterprises were now expected to have wider touchpoints with customers. Suddenly there were increasing demands for applications and solutions like never before and the enterprises were just not able to keep up.This gave rise to a fresh approach known asDevOps. Before we get into details of how it’s changing Enterprise IT, let’s try to understand the basic meaning of the term ‘DevOps.’
What Is DevOps?
DevOps is nothing but a critical combination of software development and information technology operations. The term DevOps often refers to a broad range of practices revolving around the collaboration and communication of IT professionals and software developers while trying to automate the entire process of infrastructure changes and software delivery. The prime objective of DevOps is to establish a strong culture that allows the testing, building and releasing of software more frequently, rapidly and reliably.
DevOps Tools
Many people believe that understanding DevOps is very easy, but that’s not the case. Since DevOps is a cultural shift and not a process, understanding it depends upon one’s knowledge about different DevOps tools. Some of the major categories that these tools fall into include - code, build, test, package, release, configure and monitor.
Interested to see how DevOps affects the overall enterprise IT of an organization? This is exactly what we will cover now.
DevOps & Enterprise IT
In conventional software development cycle the development and IT operations were kept as separate business units playing of each other as and when required. But today in order to keep things hassle-free, both software development teams and IT operation teams are required to come together and collaborate as a single unit. .
Ways in which DevOps is bringing about a radical change in how Enterprise IT functions
DevOps is more of an experience or culture that expands the horizon of understanding between the software development and information technology teams in an enterprise. It shows them a new path to develop innovative products together and take the organizations to newer heights. At present, it’s changing Enterprise IT in several ways, some of which are as follows-
1. Improves Communication – The bane that breaks ambitious projects
One of the major challenges IT operations and Development teams working independently come across is lack of transparency to each other’s work. So both teams continue to work as silo-ed units until they hit a major roadblock. Now if the teams were working together, collaborating and discussing each release at frequent intervals this problem could have been easily avoided. DevOps in general solves the problem of communication.
Teams collaborate together where they commit the code base they had been working at the end of the day enabling them to identify discrepancies in the system early before they are allowed to fester. Not to mention there is a broader camaraderie between the departments to ensure all spokes are integrated properly before it hits the road.
2. Improves the Timeto Market for Products
The way products and technology are getting outdated in today’s time; it has become tough for an organization to continue the product development at a slow pace. DevOps is a practice where the team comes across frequent milestones. This ensures that the team is progressing in the right direction ensuring that the product/application is production ready in accordance to the deadlines committed.
3. Decentralization of Responsibilities
Earlier, the responsibilities of any team-member- let’s say database manager were supposed to be fulfilled by him only due to lack of cross-team communication and collaboration. Even though the software developer and IT engineers knew enough to handle any sudden glitches, they couldn’t perform each other’s tasks, which many a time used to cause performance downtime. DevOps has decentralized the responsibilities of different team members to ensure that unavailability of any one person doesn’t affect the overall production cycle.
Bringing in professional expertise
The cut-throat competition in Enterprise IT is something that all the business owners are aware of. They know that delay of even one day in the product launch can cause them a huge loss and harm their business significantly. Due to the dynamic and uncertain business environment across the globe, they are not ready to take any risk, but DevOps allows them to do so. It empowers them to establish an excellent cross-team communication in their organizations and ensure that the production cycle doesn’t delay for any reason whatsoever.
By bringing in the high-performance servicing excellence of a reliable technology partner such as CIGNEX is one surefire way to extract maximum benefits from your DevOps team. With us by your side, you get widespread advantages like faster time to market, better integration, and continuous delivery.
Going forward, with the help of new technologies and approaches, DevOps is going to bring a lot better results for organizations than it did in the past. Get ready to make it a part of your organization without any further delay.
