Businesses today are roaring to disrupt their industry building sustainable business value and offering outstanding customer experience. DevOps has a significant role in enterprises accelerating innovation and faster software delivery. Owing to its rapid adoption, the DevOps market is estimated to grow to $8 bn by 2022 from $2.9 bn in 2017, according to a report by IDC. DevOps is a practice of combining development and operation beckoning a change in engineering processes and overall culture. Enabling seamless collaboration and communication between teams facilitates faster application development and pipeline maintenance. DevOps heavily relies on automation to build reliable processes.
Organizations that have implemented DevOps have realized the following benefits, according to the State of DevOps Report:
- Fewer security risks
- Quicker delivery velocity
- Greater flexibility
- The reduced change failure rate
- Better reporting
Motives for outsourcing DevOps
Despite the benefits, managing DevOps, specifically cloud-based infrastructure, applications and services pose a challenge. Enterprises also struggle with optimizing and scaling their DevOps practice. This is why businesses look to outsource DevOps. The inclination to reduce time-to-market with a high-quality user experience without the hassle of managing in-house teams is an attractive concept. Let’s take a look at the key motives for outsourcing your DevOps practice.
Agility
DevOps requires agility as it needs to deliver projects quickly and at great frequency. This includes a high-paced response to changes in the environment, technologies, and user behavior.
Expertise
Although a mainstream technology, DevOps will need experts to handle the implementation properly. Given the rapid evolution of the practice and with the new tools, regular upskilling is crucial to avoid skill gaps.
IT costs
Bringing DevOps into practice is an expensive affair. You will have to hire a team of experts, set up equipment, train resources, and manage other staffing requirements.
What is DevOps?
In general, DevOps is a software development methodology. But at its core, it’s a cultural transformation that brings together people, processes, and products to form a single entity. Such an arrangement ensures continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), monitoring, and agility.
DevOps is revolutionizing the industry by accelerating application delivery at a high velocity and uncompromising quality. DevOps has significantly helped organizations with time-to-market of ever-evolving and improving software products.
Core Principles of DevOps
DevOps, at its heart, is based on four key principles that ensure the effectiveness of the process.
Automation of the software development lifecycle
DevOps fully leverages the power of automation to replace the manual processes that delay software development. Automating all the tedious and repetitive tasks such as implementing code changes, running tests, analyzing test results, and reworking the code reduces the release cycle.
Collaboration and communication
The baseline idea of DevOps is to form a single team comprising developers, IT operators, testers, and other stakeholders with a single objective. This facilitates seamless communication and efficient collaboration.
Continuous improvement and minimization of waste
DevOps ensures that the team continuously improves the application performance as well as the development cycle. It constantly analyzes test results and other performance metrics to determine areas of improvement. Through automation, the time and effort wasted on tedious tasks are also eliminated.
Hyperfocus on user needs with short feedback loops
DevOps puts end-users in the driver’s seat. This means user feedback is implemented at a faster pace compared to traditional methodology. Automation, continuous improvement, and tight collaboration enable almost immediately.
Benefits of DevOps
Accelerate software development lifecycle
DevOps allows you to move across the development lifecycle at a faster pace. It helps you to innovate quickly, adapt to market changes better, and drive business goals. The automated process and CI/CD ensure that you are always on track to release newer product upgrades rapidly.
Guarantee quality of software updates
By quickly releasing new features and fixing issues, you proactively improve customer experience. Faster upgrades and quality improvement puts you at a competitive advantage with reliable software.
Manage development process at scale
DevOps concepts like infrastructure-as-code help you scale your infrastructure and development processes easily. Further, automation promises consistency so that you deliver a solid experience to end-users.
Improve collaboration between teams with a DevOps culture
By diversifying ownership and accountability, DevOps introduces a collaborative culture between different teams involved in the development. With shared responsibilities, teams work towards a single goal.
Automated security & compliance measures
With DevOps, you can automate security and compliance tasks, not just the core development aspects. With concepts like security-as-code, you can manage security at scale.
What is DevOps Outsourcing?
DevOps outsourcing is a practice where you contract some or all software development tasks to a company that has proven experience in DevOps methodology. It ensures that you focus on what you do best, while the vendors ensure the delivery of a quality application for you.
Although many organizations take this approach to reduce costs, outsourcing DevOps presents a great option to stay focussed on your core capabilities. Large enterprises like GitHub follow this model.
A standard DevOps-as-a-service enterprise houses a talent hub of DevOps engineers and consultants with extensive knowledge of the practices across industries. The skills and credentials of resources in such agencies are usually up-to-date. The services that outsourcing companies offer include cloud services, delivery pipeline, security and infrastructure audit, process optimization and automation, and others.
In a part-2 of this post, we will go into detail about how DevOps can be outsourced successfully. Stay tuned for that.
If you have questions related to this topic, feel free to book a meeting with one of our solutions experts, mail to sales@amazic.com.
