DevOps Automation for Faster and Continuous Product Release

Success won’t come easily unless businesses lay groundwork for it. In the cut throat competition seizing market opportunities is a key challenge for companies. Businesses have diverse IT solutions for ensuring timely product delivery to markets and streamlining operations. But are they effective as they are supposed to be? This question is addressed to C level executives who are in the helm of finance, healthcare and insurance sectors to name a few.

Experts say DevOps is a lean and agile approach intended to capture market opportunities. For that it is necessary to integrate development and operations team to automate processes. The key is behaving like production system where development and QA team work together and perform well before it is ready for deployment. The agile environment helps in enhancing the quality process where innovation is fostered among team members and the whole execution process is streamlined.

While describing about DevOps it is also necessary to understand the difference between ‘agile’ and ‘DevOps’. This is to ensure that prospective organizations need to understand the key difference between the two. Agile is about change in thinking having limited scope. On the contrary DevOps’ scope is broad that spans cultural change with the involvement of all stakeholders involved in IT product delivery. For this, the release managers utilize tools like application release automation and continuous integration tools to attain project goals by emphasizing on continuous delivery approach.

Integration Leads to Standardization

In the same vein, DevOps encourages communication within the team working on the project to analyze gaps and fix the same before the product release. Now the question is how to improve the product quality by standardizing the processes. To understand more on DevOps let us take the example of testing, an important phase in product development. The traditional method of learning from mistakes and stop repeating it is time consuming and expensive. To solve this problem, DevOps approach calls for enhanced communication among the development, business, and testing team right from the planning phase to ensure all the three stakeholders are informed well on the workflow of the new product. To be specific, this means integrating the development environment, test environment, stage environment, and production environment where all stakeholders are headed towards one direction with no hindrance in the workflow. Once the testers are involved right from the day one, the possibilities of identifying and fixing gaps during each sprint are higher. It is at this stage the importance of automation coming as it is vital to ensure standardized processes are automated for the best product quality. The end result is quality product reaching the market at a faster pace.

Functions of DevOps

What are the functions DevOps integrates? For all those who aspire to use this approach need to know the integration of various functions like:

• Continuous integration
• Continuous deployment
• Log management
• Load balancing
• Monitoring
• Infrastructure management

Organizations need to have clear understanding about DevOps automation and how to obtain maximum results through a DevOps approach. For this, it is important to understand continuous monitoring of application and environments hold the key to success of business by improving the code and processes.

Do Businesses Have DevOps Strategy?

Businesses need to have a DevOps strategy to:

• Gauge DevOps business drivers and initiatives of organizations.
• Assess important DevOps domains that align with organization’s goals.
• Prioritize projects size wise and duration wise.

Strategies are vital for gaining visibility in a competitive era. DevOps itself is a combination of strategies understanding the gaps of products and processes intended to produce standard software products and services. If businesses are convinced about the need to have a DevOps strategy, they can count on reputed IT vendors who can suggest on ‘why’s and ‘how’s on DevOps. They will examine what can be automated after identifying the gaps in the existing development and operations process to improve the same. In sum, moving towards DevOps automation is advantageous for businesses.