The software development circle is buzzing with the modern developments around DevOps. DevOps is a combination of software development practices that conjoins the terms 'development' and 'operations' together to shorten the time taken to process a new software development, a new software feature, enhancements, updates or bug fixes in alignment with business objectives and added value to users.

The concept of DevOps builds a culture of collaboration among teams that have historically operated in relative silos. The DevOps approach promises several benefits including increased confidence among teams, improved collaboration, faster software development and release, speedier problem resolution ability and better management of unplanned work. It combines automation, continuous delivery and agility to help development teams and operations to be more effective, to innovate faster and offer higher value to brands and customers with better business returns.

Over the past few years, a lot has been spoken about DevOps and how organizations use them to reap huge benefits. It is however important to note that focusing on practices, principles and values should attain more importance than tools and technology, as it is the foundation for organizations to migrate to DevOps way of working. Emphasizing on principles help organizations understand how DevOps drive process and workflow.

We discuss five essential principles for DevOps practices.

1. Focus on organizational needs

DevOps practices are so designed that it improves the working capability of IT staff through collaboration between two separate departments of development and operations. When creating IT products and services in DevOps, it is necessary to view the overall process from the control point of view and ensuring that user experience is the primary focus of each stage of software delivery.

It has become essential to ensure that all activities are targeted towards the user. Organizations need to innovate regularly with their products and services that must help to achieve a higher level of user delight. Moving to a business-centric approach is the best way to ensure that IT staff activities consistently contribute to creating business value that ultimately leads to customer satisfaction.

2. Automation is the Key

Automation is the primary objective for DevOps practices and hence 'automate everything' is the main principle behind DevOps. Automation, in DevOps, initiates with the creation of code in the machine of a developer, the code is pushed and even afterwards to monitor the application and the system in production. The DevOps pipeline fully incorporated with continuous integration, constant testing, and quick deployment, including application performance is automated.

Therefore, the most important aspect in DevOps practice is to automate the entire process from configuration and software deployment to the infrastructure setup. It relies heavily on automation to make deliveries in quick succession and perform frequent delivery across platforms. Automation thus helps in accelerating delivery pace, enhancing accuracy of service delivery, maintaining consistency and increasing the number of deliveries. Ultimately, DevOps automation works on packaging everything correctly from the creation, deployment and monitoring.

3. Agility

In a highly volatile environment in a modern business scenario, new changes occur every second. Changing customer needs, new developments in technology and new legislative regulations are demanding organizations to continuously evolve and adapt. DevOps strongly supports regular enhancements as it helps reduce waste, improve delivery speed, reduce costs, facilitates delivery, and continually improve products or services. Therefore, experimentation and enhancements are important activities to imbibe and it is essentially required also to develop a method of learning from failures.

4. Essentiality of DevOPs in Digital Transformation

Software development teams need not have excellent software engineers but must be able to visualize the larger picture. As DevOps caters to the needs and requirements of multidisciplinary teams and applications, a successful DevOps solution cannot overlook the larger picture of enterprise-wide digital transformation. It helps avoid creating conflict points and constraints that emerge from one project to another. DevOps thus help organizations transform their digital outlook by enabling them to offer service delivery faster to their end customers. It is a continuous delivery solution for the organization to automate, organize, and orchestrate the flow of change throughout the software delivery cycle.

5. DevOps Enhances Collaboration

Traditional organizations focus on horizontal alignment where, after developing an IT solution, the development team hands it over to the operations team for deployment and maintenance. If one looks at the DevOps environment where collaboration is required, it is organized vertically where stakeholders are responsible for end-to-end deployment. The application thus developed through this collaborative approach fosters collective responsibility and ultimately leading to enhancement of quality products provided to users. Every individual must understand their role in the overall presentation as well as acquire knowledge of their role at the business level.

Working in a collaborative environment to achieve integration requires a unique approach. This dependency forms the foundation upon which the DevOps bridge can be built. Once a DevOps environment is created, it contributes significantly to the organization's growth as this methodology helps them extract value from processes and products faster. Surveys conducted on companies indicate that DevOps will help organizations achieve higher productivity targets, while significantly increasing profitability and market share.

The ESPIRE way:

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Our approach involves thorough evaluation of your IT ecosystem, assessment of your business needs and user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) requirements. Based on these specific business goals, we recommend a customized application development strategy, driven by Agile and DevOps development methodology - resulting in desired business outcomes.

Click here to know how Espire is changing the DevOps journeys of our clients. If you have any query, drop us an e-mail at marketing@espire.com

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Tags : DevOps | DevOps practices | Automation | Integration | Continuous Integration | Continuous Delivery | Constant Testing | Agile | Agility | DevOps Pipeline | Collaboration | Software delivery | Digital transformation