As we move toward 2020, the expectations are high, the software industry is moving faster and the demand for rapid and continually improving digital experiences have raised the standard. To match the needs and demands of the market, firms around the world are embracing the DevOps culture to ensure and streamline the development, packaging, testing, deployment and maintenance of software at scale.
Every DevOps organization is defined by its own leadership, culture, practices, policies, leadership style, structure, talents, skills, technical capabilities, processes and tools. However, there are certain common characteristics that are important to consider before deciding a better DevOps platform to use in your organization. Today, we will discuss such important features that can help you while selecting your DevOps platform.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a mindset in an organization that enforces a set of collective practices to ensure easy collaboration between dev and ops so the business can run smoothly without any hassle. DevOps aims to fasten the time to market through frequent and incremental improvements to deliver quality software updates to customers.
The meaning and definitions of DevOps can vary from company to company. Automation being the focal point, firms want to focus on achieving zero-touch automation, with utmost security and governance as a priority in the delivery pipeline.
Even though the meaning of DevOps varies, several inherent DevOps principles cannot be replaced, and they repeatedly insist on collaborative relationships, developing early, failing early, shared learning and continuous feedback. These DevOps principles enhance quality with improved deployment rates while simultaneously improving predictability, scalability and security of the production environment. Tech leaders in the company need to view DevOps as a holistic approach rather than a small set of guidelines for the teams, and DevOps guidelines should be aligned with the company’s long term technology vision and objectives.
Here are some facts to consider while deciding a better DevOps platform for your organization.
A Mindset of a Unified Culture
Culture plays a significant role in establishing the guidelines while embracing DevOps in any organization. Through DevOps culture, companies seek to bring dev and ops teams into harmony to promote collaboration, automation, process improvements, continuous iterative development and deployment methodologies. But above everything else, a sound DevOps culture fundamentally solves one of IT’s biggest people problems: bridging the gap between dev and ops teams to get them to stop working in silos and have common goals.
According to Gartner estimation, DevOps efforts fail 90% of the time when infrastructure and operations teams try to drive a DevOps initiative without nurturing a cultural shift in the first place. It is not just about the efficient tools or experts working; it is about the behavioral modifications and mentality necessary to effect cultural change.
Hence, it is important for the firms to consider the culture of the company before selecting its tool as a potential DevOps tool for their development.
Automation Inside and Outside
Automation is one of the key principles of a strong DevOps team because it has such a high return on investment.
Automation makes up as a large part of DevOps culture to standardize production platforms, and even firms believe it as true because standardization and automation help make deployments more predictable, easy and less prone to human errors.
Automate everything as part of the workflow process, including infrastructures, compliance and continuous delivery pipeline. For example, tools such as Artifactory can manage and control all your binary repositories to help your developers and ops collaborate and automate build and deploy tasks easily. Similarly, Docker allows development teams to containerize applications and automate application deployments with speed.
By reducing manual, non-important and repetitive tasks, you will increase your development and testing speed while cutting down on human and unnecessary errors. Additionally, by automating tedious and repetitive tasks, firms free up team members to work on higher-level and more important tasks.
Important to note here, JFrog Pipelines is an innovative DevOps automation solution that well integrates and connects all critical processes in the software delivery lifecycle in the company, from development to testing to production. Using minimum code, it allows you to create smart and event-driven workflows across tools and teams easily, to speed up the release of software applications. This helps you achieve continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring in DevOps.
Support Both Hybrid and Multi-Cloud
What is Multi-cloud?
Multi-cloud is the use of cloud computing from two or more public cloud providers in single network architecture to meet their business objectives. A multi-cloud strategy has many advantages. It avoids vendor lock-in, decreases latency, enhances business continuity, overhead cost reduction and maximizes flexibility for development teams. However, multi-cloud management comes with some challenges that require careful orchestration, and needs to pay close attention to security and governance issues.
What is Hybrid-cloud?
A hybrid cloud is a mixture of on-premises and off-premises IT resources. Based on business and compliance requirements, the hybrid cloud allows firms to move data and applications between private and public environments.
Hybrid cloud computing allows instant transfer of information between public and private environments, allowing enterprises to experience the benefits of both environments efficiently.
Flexibility, scalability and cost savings are some of the top benefits of hybrid-cloud.
Considering a platform that supports both multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud is the best solution for the enterprises moving toward the digital transformation ladder.
Continuous Updates
Frequently rolling out updates, in a continuous sequence, to bring service improvements to consumer devices more rapidly and efficiently is what every firm is trying to do these days. The customer wants new features as early as possible and continuously. That is one reason why companies embrace automation and follow practices like continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous delivery through tools such as GitHub, Artifactory, Circle CI, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
The DevOps platform should be able to manage your DevOps pipeline from a single pane of glass. A platform that can provide a universal end-to-end solution that integrates with your ecosystem to orchestrate and optimize all critical processes in your CI/CD pipeline. Boosting fearless updates continuously from code to the edge in self-managed, on-prem, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
A Robust Community
All successful companies have built their own communities through their products and services. DevOps is all about the culture shift. Changing existing culture and moving forward is one of the hardest things to do—despite the benefits that DevOps offers, such as speed and agility. No matter what changes a team implements, embracing DevOps often comes to a halt once the companies realize it requires a change in culture and mentality of all the teams involved. This is where the value of community comes in, by fostering the development of a more open communication, easy and supportive feedback, and collaborative culture within teams, companies can be able to drive this DevOps culture. This mindset should come from within and outside of the organization by tapping into this sense of community-based collaboration. Communities are required because they ensure the well being of many of the technologies we use daily.
Your favorite DevOps platforms—Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Artifactory—and their popularity is because of the communities they have created around the tools.
A well-focused DevOps platform gives power to people who listen carefully to what the market is saying, gets the feedback and utilizes it effectively. Hence, community is a very important feature of a DevOps organization.
Conclusion
Companies around the world are embracing DevOps, and the demand for DevOps skills soars as organizations spend their time and money on digital transformation. DevOps has become a modern approach to IT that helps companies to think and execute broader business strategies. DevOps can drive significant brand value by accelerating speed to market, better collaboration, ensuring better testing and automation. A DevOps platform should have all the qualities mentioned above to succeed in this highly competitive market.
