The business landscape of the 21st century has become more dynamic, and Organizations are leveraging meticulous strategies to enhance their competitiveness and stand out from the crowd. As we progress from a product economy to service-based culture, a seamless customer experience is what defines success for an organization.
DevOps + Cloud Computing – may sound like a weird plan, but is deadly enough to skyrocket the business of delivering software. Let’s discover what these concepts comply with and how can the combination help organizations.
DevOps
Let’s take a quick example. A start-up company has the aim to build an AI-powered smart assistant that will respond to the human voice. The task of software development is assigned to the Development team and the task of managing, maintaining, and providing support to the software in the real world is given to the Operations team. The development team took almost a year to get the product ready with utmost confidence entrusted upon it and hands it over to the operations team. The real problem, however, arises when the product is launched in the market by the operations team – technical glitches are recognized and do not respond to the human voice. The frustrated operations team confronts the development team to which disputes and conflicts arise between the teams. Moreover, the corrections and improvement in the product might take a considerable amount of time, thereby delaying the product to be market-ready. To battle these shortcomings, DevOps come into the scene.
DevOps, when simplified implies – Development + Operations. The integration between the development team and operations team will facilitate faster delivery and efficient products and services, thus providing a seamless customer experience. DevOps is a set of philosophies, practices, and tools that help an organization deliver faster and better products by integration of development and operations functions.
Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is the delivery of on-demand computing services (servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, intelligence, etc.) over the internet (the cloud) on a pay-as-you-go basis. You have to pay only for the services you use. This helps offer faster innovation, flexible resources, lower operating costs, and efficient use of infrastructure. Cloud-based storage makes it possible to save them on a remote database, rather than stashing them on a local storage device (that may be daunting at times and can take up a lot of space). You can access the database from any device, from anywhere as long as it is connected to the internet.
DevOps and Cloud Computing
All these years the development and operations team have been working separately and at odds with each other. Now, organizations have learned to embrace the integrated functional model, thus adopting the DevOps methodology.
DevOps, together with Cloud Computing can help organizations achieve the much-needed digital transformation. If you ask why such transformation is needed – well, haven’t the global pandemic already made it clear? When social distancing is the norm of the day, digitizing all areas of the organization is the need of the hour.
How DevOps and Cloud Computing together, can prove to be fruitful for an organization;
- Cloud resources help developers save time and permit more control over their components, thereby facilitating the software to market faster.
- There is better interaction, communication, and collaboration between the development and operations functions.
- DevOps is driven by the automation of agile methodologies. Cloud computing helps DevOps undermine the traditional work pattern in organizations and deliver better products.
- Since earlier times, the distributed operations of corporations did not align with the centralized software deployment. Cloud computing resolves this issue by providing a centralized network for testing, deployment, and production.
- Automation, being the key factor to determine the success of a product is facilitated by cloud computing that makes the process more reliable, efficient, and error-free.
- Cloud provides security fixes that safeguard sensitive information in the application development workflow.
- Most cloud computing providers sustain DevOps system in their platforms that reduce the cost of on-premises DevOps automation technology. This leads to centralized governance of DevOps processes – under which developers are out of risk and departments under control.
- Cloud offers self-service portals which can help developers to implement DevOps practices of their own.
- Cloud computing increases scalability. When infused with DevOps practices, the technology advances IT transformation – reducing the cost of infrastructure and elevating global reach.
Why Organizations should use such disruptive technology?
A report from IT analyst firm Freedom Dynamics shows, using cloud or DevOps in isolation accelerates software delivery by just over 50%, while using them together can accelerate by 81%.
Digital transformation is the need of the hour, and organizations need to transition from the waterfall methodology to the agile approach. For this, they must adopt an attitude of continuous experimentation, embrace failure, frequent delivery of products, and shorten the work cycles. All of these are possible through the DevOps methodology supported by cloud resources.
Xebia USA is a leading IT Company for DevOps consulting in the USA, who is ready to face any cloud challenge and keen to develop and deploy cloud-native solutions. Their services include developing reliable and scalable infrastructures, cloud-based AI and machine learning solutions, assessment of cloud operations, and cloud services management.
In conclusion, DevOps and cloud computing complement each other and their interdependencies lead to better quality products and faster time to market. Implementation of DevOps practices and resource provisioning from the cloud helps in digital transformation in an organization. With such disruptive technologies, companies are able to find quick solutions, create a roadmap, and implement an automated approach. This saves money and time and accelerates innovation and quality.
Author Bio:
Xebia USA explores and creates’ new frontiers in IT. They provide innovative services and strive to guide the customers into the transforming world of technology.
