How DevOps Can Increase Business Productivity?

The DevOps approach since its initiation has been a game changer for businesses. Facilitating the security and efficiency of their software to make their business operations faster and more productive.

You might be thinking about what DevOps is and how I can benefit from it. Then read this blog thoroughly because you are going to find everything out. About the role of DevOps in increasing the productivity of businesses. Let's first start with the basics: what does DevOps mean?

What Is DevOps?

DevOps is an approach in software development that combines the practices of software development with IT operations. In past, these two areas used to clash, with Operations blaming developers and vice versa when software had problems.

To put a halt to this, DevOps steps in with its systematic approach of Continous Integration and Continous Development (CI/CD). We will discuss this further, moving on let's now steer towards why businesses need DevOps after all.

Why Do Businesses Need DevOps?

DevOps is all about an Agile approach of putting the customer first and delivering an excellent experience. Ensuring automation and collaboration between different teams in an organization. Here are more reasons why businesses need DevOps.

• Error detection at early stages
• Shorter development cycles
• Continuous release & deployment
• Enhanced collaboration between teams
• More customer satisfaction
• Less Cost
• Improved Quality Assurance (QA)
• Robust security measures
• Improved transparency & accountability
• Planned release process

Now after these eloborated benefits comes how you can implement DevOps in your businesses to increase the productivity of your business. Below is a small infographic to show you how DevOps supports the smooth development of software.

Source: InvoZone

Deploying DevOps strategies can help you expedite software development process, enabling businesses to respond rapidly to market needs. And deliver high quality software, and maintain a competitive edge in digital landscape. Below are some basic DevOps strategies that make the software development process efficient and ensure business continuity.

Let's start with first Continous integration

1. Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration is a mandatory and fundamental DevOps practice that includes continuously integrating code changes into a shared repository. This also involves the developers catching and solving integration issues early in the development stage. In technical terms, Automated CI pipelines streamline the code integration and validation processes, decreasing the time period required to go from development to testing.

2. Continuous Delivery (CD)

Continuous Delivery extends CI by automating the code deployment to different environments, involving production. Continuous Delivery pipelines are developed to automatically build, test and deploy the apps, making sure that they are always in the state of deployment. This effectively reduces the time as well as effort required to implement new functionalities or bug fixes, augmenting the software delivery process.

Tools that are commonly used for CD are Jenkins, Bamboo, AWS Cloud Formation, Nagios, SonarQube, and JMeter

These are some of the most important stages of the DevOps Lifecycle.

3. Automation

Automation is now the soul of the DevOps process, and it goes beyond CI/CD. It is applied to various aspects of the software development process involving testing, monitoring, security checks, and incident response.

For example, Automated testing allows for quick identification and solving of issues, whilst automated monitoring would make sure swift identification of performance bottlenecks and potential problems.

Some tools that facilitate automation are Ansible, Terraform, Amazon, Kubernetes, Docker, Chef, and Puppet.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC treats infrastructure configuration as code by defining and managing infrastructure in code. Here the operations teams can quickly provision and scale resources, decreasing the manual effort needed for setting up and managing the environment. Some famous IaC tools are Chef, Ansible, and OpenStackHeart etc.

Microservices Architecture

Microservices architecture breaks down monolithic apps into smaller, independent services. These services are built, tested, and deployed separately, propagating Agility and parallel development.

Kubernetes, Docker, Istio, Jenkins are some of the top tools used in

Kubernetes, Istio, Docker, NGINX, Apache Kafka, Prometheus, SpringBoot, QAuth2.0, Jenkins, and Consul are some of the top tools used in Microservices Architecture.

Feedback & Monitoring

Continuous monitoring of apps in production offers valuable feedback to development teams. With a real-time view of app performance and user behaviour teams can make informed decisions.

Take Away

DevOps is the mandatory part of the software development process supporting continuous deployment and continuous integration. Not to forget continuous testing at every stage promotes the development of bug-free seamless software.