Businesses have become highly agile as innovation accelerates. Over the years, software development life cycles have switched from waterfall to agile. As a result, to meet the specific needs of an agile methodology, IT operations need to deploy applications in a consistent, repeatable, and reliable manner. It can only be fully achieved with the adoption of automation.
According to the report from McKinsey & Co., digital transformation accelerated due to the pandemic in 2020. But now, it’s no longer a trend but a business need for companies who want to stay relevant in a socially distanced world. This is where DevOps comes into play.
There is a famous quote by Martin Luther King Jr, “Let’s build bridges, not walls.” This quote has proved to be an effective mantra in the software development life cycle since DevOps practices took center stage.
DevOps is a relatively new term, which primarily focuses on improved collaboration, communication, and interaction between software developers and IT operations.
Deploying software is the role of the IT operations team. Developers like to build software and change things quickly, whereas IT operations focus on stability and reliability. This mismatch of objectives can lead to conflict, and sometimes, businesses may suffer. Currently, such old divisions are breaking down, with the IT and developer roles merging and following a series of systematic principles:
- Automation
- Continuous deployment
- Monitoring
- Security
DevOps & How Does it Help Startups?
DevOps combines cultural engineering practices and patterns, and tools. They generally increase the ability of organizations to deliver apps and services at high velocity with better quality. Several essential methods have emerged to help adopt DevOps over the years, such as:
- Continuous Integration
- Continuous Monitoring
- Continuous Delivery
- Automated Backup
Here’s is a brief explanation of how DevOps helps startups:
Continuous Integration: This practice enables developers to integrate their code in its current state into a shared repository multiple times in a day. It helps them address issues before the next phase of development.
Continuous Monitoring: It is helpful when most failures arise and helps lay down a path to prevent future occurrences. The automation alerts for errors and potential bugs are a good method to achieve the goal.
Continuous Delivery: This option allows developers to deploy code automatically into production after successful testing. Thus, users get uninterrupted access and the latest versions available.
Automated Backup: This practice keeps data secure all the time. Developers should implement an automated data backup and restoration process for the staging environment for protecting the code and saving a considerable amount of time and money that it takes to recreate.
DevOps helps startups provide speed for serving their customers in a better way and compete more effectively in the market.
AWS provides services that help startups practice DevOps services. It offers a set of flexible services designed to enable them to build more rapidly and reliably and deliver products using AWS and DevOps practices. These services simplify the following:
- Provisioning and Managing Infrastructure
- Deploying Application Code
- Automating Software release processes
- Monitoring apps and infrastructure performance
Other Benefits That DevOps Offers
Apart from technical benefits, there are a number of other benefits that startups can get from DevOps. Let’s check them out:
Improved Communication & Collaboration: It enables a better understanding among teams by providing increased collaboration. For instance, the operation teams very well know the status of the development side and vice versa. In general, the increase in communication and collaboration logically ties teams together.
Better Product Understanding: When the different teams work closely in executing tasks, it makes it easy and enables these teams to know about the product beyond their specific area of expertise. For example, developers may also get to know about the product’s performance on the end-user side and scale it according to the changing requirements.
Improved Customer Experience: A collection of best practices, DevOps deepens customer engagement with the creation of useful apps in a more responsive way. The collaborative efforts make app development quicker with utmost care for customers’ requirements.
Minimization of errors: One thing that consumes a lot of time is recovery from failure. In addition, there are some product-related issues, which usually take hours for experts to perfect it. However, working on the same mistakes can be daunting and tiresome. Therefore, DevOps reduces this burden by delivering error-free products on time.
Automation: DevOps introduces an advantage for startups when it comes to improving productivity and minimizing efforts. It enables businesses to automate all the possible mundane and repetitive tasks in order to save time and effort. Thus, adopting DevOps can save time and effort for your innovation team to focus on something more productive.
Furthermore, DevOps provides a number of business benefits that can boost overall business performance for startups. Those are:
- 29% more time on innovation
- 200x more deployment frequency
- 24x faster recovery from failures
Since 2009, DevOps has evolved significantly and is still evolving. As per the research by Global Market Insights, “DevOps market size exceeded $4 billion in 2019, and is expected to grow at over 20% CAGR between 2020 and 2026.” In short, DevOps will be strengthening the interaction process in businesses. After the implementation of DevOps, the organizational silos are broken down which makes it easier to make a stable operating environment and allow more innovation and creation.
Whether a startup or a big organization, every firm can stay ahead of its competitors by strategically providing solutions tailored to suit specific needs. Hence, they can excel in a dynamic and technologically dominant world.
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