DevOps was the hot topic for any business in tech even a few years back. Big names like Netflix and Amazon used DevOps to develop quickly and frequently. According to the 2020 DevOps Trends Survey, 99% of organizations agreed DevOps impacts development and business performance positively.
However, we don’t hear about DevOps much now. Is it still relevant?
Can DevOps help you reduce your development bottlenecks?
Our team at Lodus decided to take things into our own hands and show you how DevOps reduces development bottlenecks. You can assess each use case and determine if DevOps is the answer to your development barriers.
These are the traditional benefits of DevOps.
DevOps for Agile Development
Traditional Waterfall development methods are highly rigid. It’s very difficult to step back if you make a mistake in your coding. Worst of all, you may not even be aware of the bugs till the development is over.
Naturally, this increases risks for businesses, and you can end up developing a faulty product. You will need a lot of rework and investment to fix the issues or rollback any feature.
DevOps encourages development in increments. You can write small batches of code and deploy them, albeit after thorough vetting using automated testing. DevOps can help you develop continuously and release your features or functions incrementally.
As a result, you can quickly rollback updates or any feature as you are building in increments. Additionally, it is far easier to react to feedback and refine your product to match customer preferences.
Best of all, DevOps improves your product quality. 61% of businesses were able to create high-quality deliverables, thanks to agile development, as per the survey report.
DevOps Reduces Development Time
Developing custom software can take months — no wonder most businesses struggle with an unbearable, extended time-to-market. Plus, your revenues take a hit as you wait for your development team to finish coding.
Then your QA analyst may take over, which will slowly lead your operations team to step in. Sometimes, things don’t go according to plan, and your development ends up taking more time.
Fortunately, DevOps can also reduce development time to help you release quicker. Amazon deployed every 11.6 seconds using agile development back in 2013. In two years, the tech giant pushed its production deployments to one per second, resulting in 50 million deployments every year.
How is that possible?
DevOps forces the development and operations teams to work together. Developers code with the production environment in mind to reduce the chance of issues. Additionally, DevOps methodologies like continuous delivery can help you release faster.
You also develop in increments and make your product go live with its fundamental features. Continuous integration is another technique used by Lodus to discover issues early and speed up deployments.
In a short time, you can walk the path of Amazon and deploy daily, or even multiple times a day!
DevOps Reduces Development Failures
DevOps is the ultimate key to reducing your development failures. Businesses that use this development approach experience 50% fewer failures. You can find several more statistics to prove how meaningful agile is for those in software development.
DevOps reduces development failures through many ways:
- Develop in increments for fewer failures and disruptions
- Discover errors or bugs in early phases to save costly rework
- Continuous testing for code integrity
- Continuous monitoring for immediate insight on code readiness prior to release
- Fix bugs faster and react to feedback
- Consistent environments to drive down failures
Most important of all, DevOps establishes end-to-end accountability. Everyone shares responsibility and works together to eliminate failures and achieve business objectives.
Additionally, DevOps allows you to find out what works and what doesn’t in the early development stages. You can quickly identify issues with your product and eliminate them from occurring once again.
Fail Elegantly with DevOps
DevOps lets you fail in style. Our last blog discussed how DevOps helps Netflix continue providing its services even if a small part of the app fails. This is possible only with DevOps approaches and methodologies, like releasing in increments.
Your main services keep running even if something like “Recommendations” doesn’t work. You can, too, sail the same boat by adopting DevOps today!
Update Frequently with DevOps
You need to update your product and release new features to stay above the competition. Traditional development made it very difficult and costly to release updates. Additionally, you risk disrupting your services and losing out on revenues.
DevOps can help you update frequently and successfully, even several times a day. Take Instagram, for example. The photo-sharing platform deploys 30 – 50 times daily. That too, without any human intervention. Naturally, DevOps is the ideal candidate to help them achieve extraordinary numbers.
We have already told you how continuous deployment helps you release better-quality code quickly. Lodus can use the same methodology to push updates for your product several times a day. We also use other technologies like microservices to expedite your updates. You will never have to worry about disruptions, and your users can enjoy uninterrupted services.
Practices like fail-fast can also help you ensure your features are functional.
DevOps for Quick and Seamless Scaling
The need to scale your product is good news as it means more demand. However, scaling opens up a range of challenges for any business — cost and resources being the top ones.
DevOps is not only your development companion but can also help you scale seamlessly. The approach of development rides on the back of cloud technology supporting limitless scaling. You don’t need any upfront investment and can scale as-you-go, on-demand.
Additionally, Lodus can use techniques like containerization for portability and scalability. You can pack your frameworks, libraries, and more in small packages along with your app to run in any environment.
Our team can even use tools like Terraform to configure your deployment environments easily. You can treat your infrastructure just like an application and use Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for easy vertical scaling.
The Role of DevOps in Modern Development
DevOps is constantly evolving as new technologies, practices, and trends emerge. It is adapting to modern development trends to make development quick and efficient.
Below are a few ways DevOps is transforming modern development:
Low-Code and No-Code Development
Low-code and no-code development create software applications without writing much code. They use visual tools and interfaces that allow users to drag and drop components, select options, and configure settings to build applications.
Low-code and no-code development can help developers save time, money, and effort.
The two approaches share many similarities:
- Both use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to create applications
- Both can speed up the software development process and reduce developers’ efforts
- Both are ideal for web, mobile, and desktop development
The dissimilarities include:
- Low-code development requires basic coding skills to develop and integrate complex applications. On the other hand, no-code development does not require any programming skills.
- Low-code development allows users to add code over auto-generated code. Consequently, no-code development has an entirely hands-off approach.
- Low-code development suits applications requiring customization, integration, or advanced features. No-code development is ideal for simple, standalone, or self-service applications.
Low-code and no-code development are gaining popularity with each passing day. The solutions are also evolving to become more reliable and intuitive.
Here are a few current trends you should be aware of:
- Low-code and no-code platforms are now more accessible, affordable, and user-friendly
- They are integrating with cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning,
- Low-code and no-code development platforms are supporting digital transformation initiatives
Low-code and no-code development are changing how businesses create and deliver software solutions. They offer a new way of solving problems, expressing creativity, and empowering users.
DevSecOps
DevSecOps is a way to integrate security into the software development process, from design to deployment. The approach aims to make security a shared responsibility of developers, testers, operators, and security experts.
DevSecOps also uses automation tools and techniques to embed security in every stage of the software lifecycle.
It is super important to improve the quality, reliability, and security of software solutions. Moreover, DevSecOps can:
- Detect and fix security vulnerabilities early to avoid costly rework and risks
- Reduce the time and effort required to deliver secure software
- Eliminate manual and repetitive tasks to save time and effort
- Enhance the collaboration and communication between different teams and roles
- Align software with the business goals and customer needs
The current trends shaping DevSecOps include:
Cloud-Native Development
Cloud-native development refers to building software applications designed to run on cloud platforms. It uses several technologies, such as:
- Containers – lightweight, standalone, and executable software packages that encapsulate an application with its dependencies and configuration settings.
- Microservices – an architectural style and approach to designing and building software applications as a collection of small, independent, and loosely coupled services.
- Serverless functions – a cloud computing model where the cloud provider handles the server provisioning, scaling, and maintenance.
- Orchestration tools – software solutions designed to automate, coordinate, and manage the deployment, configuration, and operation of complex systems, applications, and services.
Cloud-native development helps improve software applications’ scalability, performance, and resilience. It also enables faster and more frequent deployments.
However, cloud-native development has its share of challenges. The list includes managing complex dependencies, securing distributed systems, and protecting sensitive data.
DevSecOps uses several techniques to resolve the challenges of cloud-native development:
- Implementing encryption
- Authentication
- Authorization
- Logging
- Monitoring
- Auditing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
AI and ML enhance software applications’ functionality, usability, and personalization. However, AI and ML pose new security risks, such as data privacy breaches, malicious manipulation, bias discrimination, and ethical dilemmas.
DevSecOps can help to mitigate these risks by applying security principles like:
- Ensuring data quality, integrity, and confidentiality
- Validating models’ accuracy, robustness, and fairness
- Testing for adversarial attacks
- Monitoring for anomalies and incidents
Zero Trust Architecture
It is a security model that assumes that no network or system is inherently secure. The model has tight checks like strict verification of every request or transaction before granting access or authorization.
Zero trust architecture can boost the security of software solutions by reducing the attack surface. It can prevent unauthorized access and detect and address threats.
Moreover, a zero-trust architecture enforces granular policies. DevSecOps can help to implement zero trust architecture by applying security controls at every layer of the software stack. It can use identity-based authentication and encrypt data in transit and at rest.
Moreover, DevSecOps can segment networks, isolate workloads, and audit activities.
Value Stream Management
Value stream management is a way of measuring and improving the flow of value delivered by software development. It allows businesses to optimize processes, eliminate waste, and align products with customer expectations.
The approach is inspired by principles of lean thinking, the same principles behind DevOps. They aim to maximize customer value while minimizing resources.
The benefits of value stream management are:
- Faster and more reliable software delivery
- Reduces time and risks involved in deployment
- Improves customer satisfaction, business agility, and innovation
- Delivers what customers want, when they want it, and how they want it
- Boosts business reputation and perception
- Enhances employee engagement by encouraging collaboration, feedback, and learning
- Identify bottlenecks, waste, and inefficiencies in every stage of the software delivery cycle
Final Thoughts
DevOps still helps you resolve development bottlenecks to deliver fantastic software. It supports digital transformation initiatives and fosters a culture of collaboration and learning. DevOps is also evolving with new technologies, practices, and trends. The methodology will continue to impact software development around the world for decades to come.
Get in touch with us today to implement DevOps for your organization. We can also help you develop high-quality software based on evolving DevOps principles.