Why businesses should adopt DevOps?

What we need to understand while adopting DevOps?

Even though DevOps made it to the mainstream technology front a decade ago, there are still many questions that need to be answered before adopting a fully functional DevOps platform. A DevOps platform can blend development, operations, and testing teams together, and set up cross-functional teams to improve the agility of enterprise IT service delivery. Based on a global survey conducted by GitLab, 65% of software professionals believe that DevOps workflow has saved them time during the development process and 29 percent are planning to invest in DevOps in 2018.

What we need to know about DevOps?

While adopting DevOps, the prime focus should be given to the product developed using the suitable DevOps use cases or process. “Even though there are multiple sets of tools available for each industry in the DevOps market, the success of the project always lies in choosing the apt DevOps tools and customizing them according to the needs of a specific project developed” quotes Jerry Don, CTO – Toobler Technologies. Toobler Technologies is more focused on providing DevOps as a service-oriented company than focusing on a single product-based company. We can provide our expertize in developing mobile, web or desktop apps, by adopting DevOps culture.

Acing with our experience in DevOps projects, we understand that to run a successful project we must never adopt a DevOps process run by another vendor or project. By running a trial and error method, we finalize on implementing the DevOps tools that are suitable for the project environment. For example, an e-commerce platform planning to adopt DevOps should not compare the needs of the project to another e-commerce platform like Shopify, as they both differ in their own current environment and the technologies used. The technology strength, the core strength of the development team, project management systems, and the tools used for collaborating the project are some of the key factors that should be analyzed and focused on while adopting DevOps. For example, Slack and Skype are mostly picked as one of the best project management and communication tools to collaborate on a DevOps project. Since each action in a DevOps project, runs on automated codes right from programmers to QA to the computing infrastructure management monitoring; the manual system is transformed into an automated system that enhances the time and quality efficiency. We can very well say that adopting DevOps is ‘major cultural shift’ since it transforms the existing manual system to an automated system. It would be appropriate to cite that a DevOps process cannot be defined with a single tool, it is a combination of a set of tools that automate the process.

1 DevOps as an Extend Agile Methodology

Most companies adopt an agile methodology to accelerate software delivery and enhance quality. DevOps, in terms, can be mentioned as an extend agile methodology since it integrates software development, testing, and deployment activities. Enterprises can fasten their software delivery process and also implement agile values to deployment, performance monitoring, and environment configuration.

2 Simplify Communication and Collaboration using DevOps

The DevOps process integrates various teams like – programmers, testers, and operation engineers to work as a single team. The team understands business requirements and expected project goals better since there is continuous automated communication. This collaboration helps programmers, testers, and operation engineers to experiment, innovate, and research further about the DevOps project.

3 Automated Tasks in DevOps

Switching to DevOps is considered a cultural shift, since enterprises have to adopt automation tools and virtual production platforms. The continuous integration and deployment help to cut on any time delays and add to work efficiently.  The various automated tasks in DevOps include – automatic build, automatic test, automatic code coverage/code quality, automatic infrastructure management, automatic deployment, automatic performance test, and automatic monitoring. The automated development and delivery cycle of the software help businesses in a practical environment.

4 Decreased rate of failures and fixes in DevOps

The automated development and testing process in DevOpshelp businesses to reduce both testing time and cost incurred on the project. The early detection of errors shortens the development cycle and helps in the frequent deployment of codes. As developers, testers, and operations engineers work simultaneously, they can troubleshoot and fix errors faster, and keep the software functional. This, in turn, provides better profit and higher ROI for the businesses.

5 Creating a Performance-Based Work Environment using DevOps

DevOps allow businesses to transform the work environment by focusing mainly on performance. The unified work environment allows various project stakeholders to collaborate without many obstacles. The software developers and operations engineers can perform their best by analyzing the roles and sharing risk.

Toobler Technologies and our DevOps Trail

Toobler has been a part of the DevOps culture for more than 5 years and has successfully run various projects for multiple sectors. In this journey, we have faced many challenges in our projects and have successfully overcome them by adopting a DevOps culture. To quote an example, Projects that run over years or in hold for some time or in maintenance mode, face multiple challenges in the regular development process. In those cases, the manual mode of build, test, and deployment takes more time. This is where DevOps comes to the rescue! The advantage of using DevOps in an early stage of development helps to reduce the build, test, and deployment time. The time spent in build, test, and deployment will not increase based on the growth of development, or projects in hold/maintenance mode.

To know about our DevOps trail and what we follow at Toobler, here’s a quick look at things –

Source code

plays a pivotal role in DevOps projects, and a Git repository is a widely used version control is mostly used for our projects. Even though various versions of the Git are provided by GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, and Beanstalk, GitHub is the most widely used repository. However, one can develop their own Private Git environment based on the project. At Toobler, we currently use GitLab, while Beanstalk was previously used for various projects. Branching is an important feature of source code in DevOps is utilized for our projects and helps to collaborate with multiple teams. Workflow in DevOps is yet another important aspect that we need to look at. GitHub Flow, Gitlab workflow are some of the commonly available workflows that help to collaborate and branch in a DevOps process. Based on the requirements of the DevOps project, specific workflows can be created and adopted. The project works at Toobler mostly adopt the GitLab workflow.

The next step in the DevOps process includes Continuous Integration, which runs the automated test. Jenkins, Circle CI, Travis CI, and Gitlab CI are some of the widely used tools in Continuous integration. During the continuous integration process in DevOps, the code placed in the repository is tested automatically and continuously. Both source code and test code being automated together, it helps in completing the project efficiently without any time delays. One cannot randomly choose a continuous integration tool for a case since all repositories do not accept continuous integration tools. There are no predefined set of tools for a particular project environment. So based on the current project environment, one must wisely choose the set of tools to run the same.

Continuous Deployment

is the next step in this process, which communicates and deploys any failures, reported in the source code automatically. With continuous deployment, the reported errors are brought to the ChatOps medium – chatbots. Once the source code errors are fixed, it is deployed automatically in the continuous deployment process. This automated production brings enhanced changes and reduces production time and improves quality efficiently.

Infrastructure-a-code

is another important step in the DevOps process that defines and enables to build a computing infrastructure as a code in the cloud platform. AWS–Cloud Formation and Terraform are two main technologies used in building infrastructure as a code. This in return, helps to reduce project cost and provides better time efficiency. The Git repository will include infrastructure as a code.

ChatOps

, the communication channel that helps to automate communication and execution of tasks or information between various teams.  At Toobler, Slack is used to communicate. It communicates between bots and communication team members, which helps in faster and effective communication.

To know more on DevOps adoption and what not to do while adopting DevOps you can always reach us.