Delivering high-performance applications requires an approach that brings out the best of both product and operations. DevOps transformations allow businesses to improve collaborations between the development and production teams. For example, organizations leverage DevOps’s Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) approach to deliver apps without manual configurations.
Similarly, DevOps culture provides multiple advantages of automation in development and improved delivery. This article focuses on the benefits of DevOps adoption and how it can help streamline the development process.
Challenges in Traditional Development Approaches
Traditional development approaches often suffer from siloed teams, manual processes, and slow-release cycles. This can lead to delays, errors, and frustration for developers and customers.
Some key challenges of traditional development approaches are
- Silos– Different teams, like development, operations, and quality assurance, are often separated, leading to communication problems and delays.
- Manual processes are often relied upon in traditional development but can be slow and prone to errors.
- Slow release cycles– Long and drawn-out traditional development cycles cause delays in delivering customers new features and bug fixes.
- Slow feedback loops- Customer feedback must pass through several teams before reaching the developers, resulting in delays for bug fixes and feature releases.
- Lack of automation- Relying on manual deployments and testing can slow down the process and increase the likelihood of errors.
- Risk aversion- When release cycles are long, it can discourage frequent releases and prevent quick feedback.
- Lack of ownership- No single team is responsible for a feature from start to finish, which often leads to blame-shifting.
Key Pillars of DevOps Transformation
DevOps is a set of practices combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to cut the systems development life cycle short and offer continuous integration and delivery.
The key pillars of DevOps transformation are:
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): This is the practice of managing infrastructure using code. IaC allows for more automation and repeatability in infrastructure provisioning and configuration.
- Automation in development: This is the practice of automating as many tasks as possible in the software development process. This can include tasks such as build, test, and deployment.
- Collaboration in software development: This is the practice of promoting collaboration between development and operations teams. This can be done through shared tools, processes, and communication channels.
- Monitoring and automation: Automating build, test, and deployment processes minimizes errors and speeds up delivery. Tracking metrics provides valuable insights for continuous improvement. Leveraging data-driven assessments improves software quality and competitiveness.
Blazeclan’s DevOps Transformation Solution
Blazeclan is a strategic digital transformation partner renowned for its exemplary track record in DevOps transformation capabilities. It specializes in providing technology companies with solutions that drive substantial business performance improvements and facilitate on-demand scalability, leading to significant cost savings.
Blazeclan’s DevOps Transformation for an Established Travel Company
Blazeclan’s client is one of the oldest established travel companies in the world, with a distinguished history dating back to 1758. Travel company has offices worldwide including the UK, USA, Japan, Singapore, and Dubai.
Specific Development Challenges Faced by A Client
A customer launched a Travelogix ERP program in 13 countries using .NET, Sitecore, and other technologies. As the business grew, they wanted to migrate legacy applications to AWS and streamline development processes. The customer was dedicated to staying ahead of the tech curve.
How Blazeclan Facilitated A Seamless DevOps Adoption to Overcome the Challenges
BlazeClan helped the travel company gain a competitive edge by transitioning to the cloud. It provided expert consulting, assessed business cases and costs, and executed the migration of 10+ applications.
This DevOps success story shows how Balzeclan was able to enable AWS migrations, on-demand infrastructure, and reduced OPEX.
Measurable Improvements Achieved through the Transformation
The client was able to save money by moving applications to AWS and only paying for the instances being used. This allowed the travel company to adjust computing needs based on demand during peak seasons. With BlazeClan’s help, the client reduced financial risk with an OPEX-based system and only running dev systems for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
Benefits of DevOps Transformation
The benefits of DevOps adoption are vast and can positively impact both the development and operations teams in an organization. DevOps can improve software quality and efficiency by streamlining development processes and optimizing workflows.
Communication and collaboration tools like Slack and Trello help to enhance team cohesion, while platforms like Yammer and SharePoint aid in collaborative processes. Automation tools like PowerShell DSC, Chef, and Puppet bridge the gap between development and production. Further, it also helps in leveraging Agile methodologies where incremental iterations require enhanced collaborations.
DevOps transformation can maximize efficiency and place an important focus on people, ultimately strengthening alignment with customer and business needs.
Other benefits include,
- Faster software delivery
- Higher-quality software
- Reduced costs
- Improved customer satisfaction
Best Practices for a Successful DevOps Transformation
Some of the best practices that you can follow for enhanced DevOps transformation are,
Align goals with business objectives
Businesses need to ensure DevOps goals align with overall objectives. Involve stakeholders at all levels and keep them engaged for success.
Implement automation
Consider using automation tools like PowerShell DSC, Chef, or Puppet to streamline your workflow. These tools save time and increase efficiency by automating manual tasks, allowing you to focus on more critical work and achieve better results.
Regular monitoring
Regularly monitor your DevOps processes to catch problems before they cause outages. This will improve efficiency and maintain reliability and performance.
Rapid development
Fast delivery is key in DevOps. Reducing lead time enables businesses to market new features and products quickly, leading to higher revenue and customer satisfaction.
Future-Proofing the Development Process
If you want to future-proof your software development process, DevOps is an ideal culture to embrace. This means anticipating the future of DevOps, changes in technology, tools, and user demands so that your system remains efficient and competitive.
With DevOps, you can automate many of your development and operational tasks to reduce errors, speed up processes, and allow for scalability.
Adapting to Evolving Technology Trends
You’ll also need to stay up-to-date with evolving technology trends, such as containerization, microservices architectures, cloud-native environments, and AI in DevOps. By fostering continuous communication, collaboration, and transparency between development and IT operations teams, you can continuously improve and release necessary feature changes or additions.
Continuously Improving and Optimizing DevOps Practices
The process of continuously improving and optimizing DevOps practices largely involves consistently analyzing your DevOps strategies and processes for potential issues, bottlenecks, or inefficiencies.
This includes refining your practices such as streamlining the collaboration and communication between teams, using automation for routine tasks like code compiling and testing, managing code versions effectively using tools like Git, and leveraging the right development environment for optimal productivity.
Conclusion
Future-proofing your DevOps processes by staying up-to-date with evolving technology trends and promoting continuous integration and delivery is crucial. It helps reduce costs and enhance customer satisfaction. Further DevOps transformation can improve collaborations, which is important if you want to maintain consistent delivery of high-performance apps.
You need a strategic partner to ensure efficient DevOps transformation, and this is where Blazeclan can help you. Being at the forefront of delivering bespoke DevOps transformation solutions, Blazeclan can help your future-proof development process. Contact us now for more information on DevOps transformation solutions.