DevOps and its Impact on Information Technology (IT)
DevOps refers to an enterprise software development method and a collaborative way of developing and deploying software. The word ‘DevOps’ (Development and Operations) was coined by Patrick Debois, best known as “the father of DevOps” in the year 2009. DevOps is an operational philosophy that promotes better communication between Development and Operations, cross-practicality and better working relationship. DevOps helps to establish collaborative cross-functional teams that share responsibility for maintaining the system that runs the software and prepares the software to run on that system with increased quality feedback and automation issues.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps is considered to be a set of business-driven practices that provides rapid and reliable software delivery, providing business value to customers in an efficient manner. It is used to improve collaboration between all stakeholders from the planning stage through delivery and automation of the delivery process.
Some of the benefits of adopting DevOps are as follows:
Guiding Principles
The guiding principles of DevOps consist of CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement and Sharing. Culture is pervasive and drives the behavior of the employees of an organization while Automation is considered to deliver measurable business value to the organization. Measurement is a driving force as measuring “DevOps success” is a critical factor and Sharing helps you to know how knowledge is captured and disseminated.
Some of the significant reasons for enterprises to adopt DevOps are:
- DevOps organizations can deliver with maximum speed, functionality, and innovation.
- Includes technical benefits like continuous software delivery.
- Less complexity to manage and faster resolution of problems.
- Cultural benefits include happier and more productive teams, higher employee engagement and greater professional development opportunities.
- Faster delivery of features.
- More stable operating environments.
- Improved communication and collaboration.
- More time to innovate (rather than fix/maintain).
- Continuous delivery, less complex problems to fix, fewer failures.
- Faster resolution of problems and more time to focus on high-value features.
- Increased customer satisfaction and reduced cloud/server infrastructure costs.
- Faster delivery of software features, increase in sales and more stable operating environments.
Who’s doing DevOps?
Companies from traditional retailers to big software companies are now using DevOps in order to bring improvements in their cloud and server infrastructure. They have become aware of the significance of DevOps for facilitating product management and development cycles and enhancing security and application reliability. Before the DevOps movement took place, teams within IT like Operations, Development and QA were somewhat siloed but now, DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations teams and addresses the challenges of today’s timeline for application development.
