Streamline, secure, scale: why managed DevOps is a game changer for cloud development

Responding to market demands

If you’re a mission critical business that develops systems and applications, you understand the pressure to focus on responding swiftly to customer demands, developing reliable applications and continuous innovation.

A DevOps approach helps to meet those demands. DevOps unites development and operations teams to for greater collaboration. It helps to streamline workflows for efficiency and accelerate the delivery of high-quality software. At its heart, DevOps is about reducing the time it takes for a change in the software to move from concept to production without compromising quality.

By combining these practices with a culture of visibility, collaboration, and shared accountability, DevOps enables organisations to innovate faster and achieve their business goals more efficiently.

The need for multiple software development environments

A key part of a robust DevOps approach is using multiple software development environments. Multiple environments can lower your development risk, increase the reliability of your testing and help you to deploy new software rapidly and smoothly. All of which keeps you ahead of your competition and enables you to deliver outstanding customer service.

A multi-environment strategy ensures that testing, quality assurance, and deployment occur in controlled, well-defined stages. For example, if your organisation has frequent releases, you could well be developing one release at the same time as QAing another. Multiple development environments support this parallel development approach. Developers and QA teams can work simultaneously on new features without waiting for ongoing testing to finish. Or if you have a service-oriented architecture, with backend services modified by separate teams, multiple environments ensure that changes are tested against relevant configurations, reducing the risk of failures in production. Each environment serves a specific purpose, and isolating testing processes minimises the risk of issues slipping into production.

Managed DevOps

Whilst some organisations are confident in setting up a DevOps approach themselves, others simply do not have the skills or resources to implement a DevOps approach in house, so they turn to forward-thinking experts like The Server Labs to set up and manage it for them.

The Server Labs' approach

The Server Labs (TSL) provides managed DevOps services to help you optimise your software development and deployment processes. As experts in scalable, flexible cloud environments, we use the latest cloud technologies to create tailored solutions to meet your specific needs.

Whilst every organisation’s requirements are unique, when it comes to the number of environments, our experience is that most require at least three, and possibly four or more: ?

• Development (Dev) Environment: This is where initial code creation and testing occurs, and Dev is the foundation for all subsequent environments.
• Test Environment: Used for functional, integration, and regression testing. While it mirrors the production setup, it doesn't need to handle the same volume of data.
• Pre-Production Environment: A mirror of the production environment, this is where performance testing and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) take place. Skimping on this stage can introduce significant risks, such as undetected bugs and security vulnerabilities.
• Production Environment: The live system where end-users interact with the application. No testing should occur here.

A scalable, flexible and secure DevOps environment

We provide these environments using the following approach:

• Cost Efficiency: Scaling resources dynamically to minimise costs.
• End-to-End Environment Management: development, test, and production environments.
• Client-Focused Customisation: Delivering bespoke solutions for exceptional results.
• Cloud-Driven Agility: Quickly spinning up environments for development, testing, and parallel workflows
• Infrastructure as code: for efficient and scalable DevOps, you need to be able to create and configure environments as and when you need them. We achieve this by using Infrastructure as code to rapidly spin up new environments and having preconfigured standard datasets with?which they are loaded. So if, for example, you need a fifth environment for performance testing, you can spin it up rapidly and spin it down when no longer needed. We use the Terraform IaC tool to safely and efficiently develop, modify, and version infrastructure components.
• FinOps – we will integrate FinOps strategies to lower your overall costs. For example if no development is taking place at night or over a weekend, environments?can be suspended?or destroyed and rebuilt as needed.
• Pre-Production Accuracy: By replicating production conditions, TSL's pre-production environments catch issues that might otherwise appear only after deployment.
• Automatic Rollback Protocols: If unforeseen errors do arise in production, automatic rollback capabilities are essential to quickly revert to a previous stable state, reducing downtime and mitigating risks to security and operations. These mechanisms allow systems to swiftly revert to a previous state in case of post-deployment issues, ensuring service continuity.
• Secure Cloud Architecture Design: For clients managing their environments, TSL designs robust cloud architectures that integrate secure development pipelines, parallel environments, and rollback capabilities.

The Server Labs approach in practice

This approach has helped clients across Europe to maintain high system security, avoid critical incidents, and achieve seamless deployments, positioning them as leaders in their industries. Our thoroughness has helped all our clients to avoid major incidents and maintain elevated levels of system security and uptime.

Our expertise in adopting a multi-environment strategy and leveraging best practices helps businesses to reduce risks, ensure high-quality software delivery, and maintain their competitive edge.

If you’re seeking to optimise your DevOps practices, talk to The Server Labs about our expertise in DevOps managed services or cloud architecture design to ensure resilience and reliability across the software development lifecycle.

?The Server Labs are cloud experts, who help mission critical organisations to develop and operate in and maximise their value from the cloud. Contact us for help in ensuring that you have a robust approach to DevOps.?

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