The Significance of DevOps For Technology Companies

A majority of technology companies have a complex workforce infrastructure that requires constant monitoring, optimization, and supervision at every level. In addition, there needs to be an efficient way to establish real-time communications, collaborations, integration, and cooperation between developers and other entities that work together. To efficiently manage this complex infrastructure and accurately address the requirements, DevOps is a prerequisite for IT companies. Besides, the increasing technological advancements have made it essential to implement DevOps to meet the dynamic requirements of IT infrastructure. 

At Oodles Technologies, we have successfully implemented DevOps in our own technical services ecosystem. In addition, we provide end-to-end DevOps solutions to clients for strengthening their IT infrastructure with our tried-and-tested development and operations techniques. Based on our experience in the said domain, we share some valuable insights and reasons for choosing DevOps solutions.

This blog post highlights the significance of DevOps for technology companies and how it is becoming an indispensable part of the IT industry.

Also read Benefits of Using AWS For DevOps

What Is DevOps? 

DevOps is an umbrella concept that improves interactions between development and operations departments to streamline IT operations. It is the combination of tools, techniques, and agile methodologies that enable an organization to improve its services and deliver effective solutions to clients. DevOps strategies accelerate the organization’s software development and infrastructure management processes and reduce time-to-market. 

Why Does It Matter?

DevOps brings development and operations teams under the same roof to accelerate the application development lifecycle and reduce time-to-market. Under the consolidated DevOps model, engineers work together in a streamlined manner to achieve the mission-critical app development and maintenance tasks. 

Development team designs and develops each block of functionality which is immediately tested by the QA engineers. After the quality assurance and testing stage, the operations team takes over to finalize the release and deployment of the application. Operations team is also responsible for continuous monitoring and maintenance to ensure seamless app performance across devices. 

Below is a neat representation of step-by-step DevOps processes:  

Development

• Planning
• Coding
• Build 
• Quality Assurance (Testing)

Operations

• Release
• Deployment
• Configuration
• Monitoring

Understandably, DevOps has several stages and it requires a set of tools to automate each of these stages. As a result, the application development, deployment, and optimization become fast, efficient, and more effective.   

How It Works?

To understand the work process, let’s take a quick example. Bob wants to develop an application to promote his new retail business. He teams up with Tim, a developer, Paul, a QA engineer, and Andrea, an operations expert. Under the DevOps model, the process execution will be as follows. 

Development

• Planning

Tim formulates a plan or in simple terms, a development strategy to begin with. It includes finalizing the modules, algorithms, and development tools required for the execution. 

• Coding and Version Control

Once he has the plan and the essential tools in place, he may proceed to code using tools such as Git. He also maintains a repository for storing codes and their different versions. The process of maintaining these repositories is known as version control.  

• Build

The next step is to fetch this code and make it executable. It is the Build stage where Tim prepares the code for the deployment using tools such as Maven and Gradle.

Quality Assurance and Testing

QA testing is essential to ensure that the product is bug-free and promises long-term durability and performance. Our QA engineer, Paul conducts automation testing using tools like Selenium and Jira to detect bugs and potential points of failure. If bugs are detected, Tim would iterate the code and take essential measures to fix them. 

You may also be interested in reading Strengthening Content Delivery Networks With AWS CloudFront

Operations

After development and testing comes the operations part. 

• Deployment

Once the product is tested and build is deployed, our operations expert, Andra must deploy it further. 

• Configuration

After the successful deployment, it is continuously configured to operate as per the user requirements. Different stages of operations can be automated using tools like Ansible, Puppet, and Docker. Andra prefers Ansible because of its simple approach and intuitive interface. 

• Monitoring

At the same time, the application is continuously monitored in its working environment. Nagios and Kibana are two popular tools used for this purpose. Andrea keeps sharing the app data to Tim for performance analysis. Based on this data, Tim and Bob and plan new changes in the application to improve their customer experiences. Upon finalization, the changes are implemented using the same development, testing, and operations cycle. 

Closing Remarks

You see how DevOps streamlines and automates the entire software development lifecycle and provides continuous feedback to release new software versions. Most importantly, DevOps accelerates software development and maintenance through continuous configuration, continuous monitoring and continuous integration. Continuous integration between development and operations stages is achieved using tools like Jenkins that automate the process. Jenkins is an effective tool that automatically sends the given code for build and tests. If a given set of code passes the test, Jenkins sends it further for the deployment stage, thereby facilitating a continuous integration.  

Avail Our DevOps Solutions To Improve Software Development and Maintenance

We are a seasoned software development company that provides end-to-end DevOps solutions to accelerate and automate the software development lifecycle. We have an experienced team of developers, QA engineers, and operations experts that work together to improve your app performance with continuous monitoring, configuration, and integration. Our development team is skilled at using the latest tools and techniques to optimize the app performance and reduce time-to-market.