DevOps Consulting: Solutions for Software Challenges

What is DevOps?

DevOps is an abbreviated compound of development and operations. It refers to a well-balanced mix of business culture, tools and corporate practices. The combination is designed to positively drive any software development company to supply software and services at a rapid pace. DevOps technologies enables businesses to improve on their products and services with higher efficiency when compared to traditionally run software development companies. Overall, it allows software development companies to serve their customers in a better way by gaining competitive advantage. This is exactly why many software companies rely on DevOps consulting to reap multiple benefits as reported by Puppet’s State of DevOps Report.

DevOps services is not just a product or process. It is a lot more than that. DevOps is a business culture phenomenon where robust communication between software development and operations department is encouraged. It streamlines the process in a way that code goes at a rapid pace through crucial phases of development, testing and deployment.

A majority of teams waste 40% of their resources. DevOps technologies can help bringing down the waste by considerable margin. According to Walker Royce, Chief Sofware Economist at IBM,

DevOps applies lean and agile principles across the lifecycle and across the enterprise with richer feedback cycles everywhere. Lean transformation enables more efficient delivery and continuous feedback enables more effective steering. DevOps adoption can balance delivery speed with trusted outcomes.

History Of DevOps

Although the roots of DevOps go as far back as early 2000s, the idea as a whole started to gather traction around 2007-08.

In 2009, at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference, 2 Flickr employees, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond played the roles of development and operations heads in a presentation called 10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr. They exhibited the resentment filled attitude that departments have for each other at the time of software deployment. The presentation concluded that the only way for both departments to achieve smooth deployment is to have seamless, integrated and fully transparent communication on regular basis. That’s when DevOps was officially born.

In 2010, the DevOps consulting services started gaining traction in the United States and in 2013 we had Gene Kim, George Spafford and Kevin Behr redefining DevOps with their publication The Phoenix Project that depicted a fictional story of an unfortunate IT manager. A lot of progress has already been made since this idea’s inception and more and more companies are embracing the set of ideas that define modern DevOps as a service.

What Challenges You Can Solve With Devops Consulting?

• Conflicts
• Lack of Communication
• Inefficient Feedback Loop
• Single Point Failure

Conflicts

One of the major pains that can be solved with DevOps consulting is inter-departmental conflict. Both teams, software development and operations, believe that the other doesn’t understand their work flow and is trying to pass off the blame to cut down their workload. With the introduction of DevOps technologies, both teams collaborate with each other from the beginning. That improves the whole process and eliminates friction between teams. Plus it also helps in building DevOps skills in the company. There are at least 6 types of conflicts that DevOps consulting solves.

Lack of Communication

Without DevOps in place, teams work independently and try to achieve departmental targets individually. Most of the time both teams are not aware of what other team is trying to achieve, what their challenges are, and where they want to be. This lack of communication often results in delays and conflicts. With DevOps consulting, software development companies can introduce regular communication which allows both teams to understand and appreciate each other’s goals and challenges. It changes the culture you work in.

Inefficient Feedback Loop

In traditionally run businesses where DevOps engineer/s isn’t present, feedback loop is more often than not ineffective and inefficient. In the absence of proper communication and collaboration, feedback doesn’t get communicated adequately. And when it does, it often lacks crucial factors. This in turn makes the work difficult for the software development team and the cycle continues resulting in wastage of human and time resources.

With automation and communication, DevOps consulting ensures there is an effective and efficient feedback loop that results in quick fixes.

Single Point Failure

When a software development team is working to achieve individual goals, many among the team write automation scripts to streamline their own work flow. However, they are the only ones who know where the script is and how it works. If and when the script fails to run, it brings whole system to a halt creating a single point bottleneck because of an individual software developer.

With DevOps, software developers work toward a common goal and every line of code is written with mutual coordination and collaboration. The whole team knows how the code works. This is one of the reasons why DevOps outsourcing is on the rise as well apart from increasing popularity of cloud DevOps.

Advantages of DevOps Consulting

DevOps consulting helps any organization to restructure and achieve a plethora of technical and cultural benefits. DevOps companies tend to achieve their targets quickly and more efficiently. According to the report of BCG Analysis, deployment of DevOps solutions brings multiple benefits.

Once you’ve transformed your software development company with DevOps skills,

• You reach 2 to 4 times faster to the market,
• Achieve 3 to 4 times higher customer satisfaction,
• Make 3 to 4 times higher return on your digital investment
• And most importantly, more than 90% employees say they feel engaged increasing employee satisfaction rate.

There is no wonder why many software development companies are looking for DevOps outsourcing and DevOps consulting services these days.

So here’s the benefits of DevOps Consulting,

Cultural Benefits

• Productive Work Environment
• Improved Engagement
• Professional Growth

Business Benefits

• Stability
• Cost Effective
• Innovation

Technical Benefits

• Speed & Efficiency
• Better Management
• Quick Problem Solving
• Scaling
• Security

Technical Benefits of DevOps Consulting

Speed & Efficiency

With continuous inter-department collaboration, both teams are in a position to achieve software programming and deployment targets at a rapid pace. Feedback can be quickly turned into executable results.

Amazon used to run on dedicated servers which means a lot of dedicated resources had to be spent. But as soon as the behemoth moved to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, it allowed company’s engineers to deploy code every 12 seconds on average.

Better Management

Allowing member to member coordination irons out a lot of issues and removes many technical kinks in the work. This means there is less to manage and results contain fewer bugs. That can be achieved with implementing DevOps technologies.

Netflix relies on Simian Army which is a combination of automated DevOps tools that assess company’s infrastructure. This means Netflix can identify and fix any vulnerabilities before they affect customers.

Quick Problem Solving

When communication exists between software development team and operations team, issues are reported instantly. This helps to easily to put finger on the problem and resolve it. For example, Walmart uses OneOps which is a cloud based software allowing acceleration and automation of application deployment. With a team of high quality DevOps skills, your software development company can reach its full potential as well.

Scaling

DevOps consulting can also enable the organization to operate and manage software development, infrastructure management and deployment at a much larger scale. Automation combined with seamless communication eases the difficulty and complexity of the processes involved.

Facebook uses Chef which is a configuration management platform. It has allowed the company to pace up its development cycle and incorporate users’ feedback quickly and effectively.

Security

With DevOps consulting, companies can introduce far robust systems. These systems make it easier for the teams to be in control of the software project. Also it helps to ensure that compliance is achieved. It enables teams to work on a level where every detail of the software is right under their eye.

Adobe started to make its move 5 years back as the company transferred its digital reliance from packaged software to cloud services. The step introduced convenience for the company as they were able to deploy small updates continuously without any issues.

Cultural Benefits of DevOps Consulting

Productive Work Environment

DevOps consulting, by encouraging real time communication and coordination, eliminates chances of departmental resentment. This results in a working environment where employees are happier and deliver results within deadlines.

Improved Engagement

DevOps consulting services also enables employees to feel invested in what they are doing and goals they are trying to achieve. That way employees take it upon themselves to look for problems, communicate and find the solution.

Professional Growth

Inter-department communication and collaboration means both teams get to understand and appreciate how the other department works. And what challenges they face on day to day basis. Broadened exposure results in professional growth opportunities where employees can learn and gain perspectives.

Business Benefits of DevOps Consulting

Stability

When we run and assess the code in short intervals, the end product tends to be stable. This means that software doesn’t require intensive quality assurance and debugging. We can address most of the errors and bugs during the coding process.

Cost Effective

With IT consulting and DevOps strategies, you can enable a workflow where employees are more productive and software gets coded in less time. This results in direct and indirect cost savings, as the time saved can be allocated to other software projects.

Innovation

When multiple teams are working together and are in a pursuit of shared goal, they think of ideas that otherwise would never come up. In order to get to the end product quickly, new ideas get pushed and innovation out of experience is born. By bringing in Azure DevOps engineers, Azure DevOps companies can introduce many groundbreaking changes.

Conclusion

Overall, DevOps is an evolving phenomenon in the IT industry. There is no one formula that works for every software development company.

DevOps technologies can revolutionize the way your business operates. You have to mix and match and see for yourself what works the best for your software company. To start on an initial basis, I would recommend you to hire a DevOps Engineer from an offshore software development company as that helps on to save significant costs and also experiment to see what works best for you.