How DevOps can improve software releases. Digital businesses rely on agility and scalability. Build competitive advantage and keep costs minimized by adapting to changes and using DevOps strategies. Building architectures for scale, reuse, automation, and self-healing can free both developer and IT operations resources to focus on creating business differentiation, meeting customer demands and taking advantage of business opportunities. DevOps strategies can be put in place to reduce the overhead necessary to create an environment that fosters innovation while reducing risk from security, environment mismatches, and other issues.
The High Cost of Development Time
Software or Web app development time is often the biggest determinant of time-to-market and represents the highest cost. With a shrinking labor market, improving the productivity of existing resources moves beyond business advantage to being a critical component of business health.
Applications are at the forefront of differentiation and growth strategies. Outsourced solutions that automate repeatable and iterative engineering and automation enable an increased focus on business differentiation allowing organizations to free resources and drive innovation, agility, and speed.
What could you do with a 10% per-person increase in the productivity of your development and operations teams?
If you could save each developer in a four-person team 10 percent of their time you could:
- Reduce time to market and costs
- Try more experiments that increase your chances of successfully addressing market changes
- Delay hiring
- Keep your burn rate under control; focus resources on services and products to deliver
Using DevOps best practices to eliminate inefficiencies in infrastructure provisioning and maintenance as well as application development workflow can directly impact your probability of success. Creating a high-performance development model can be accomplished through relatively easy architectural changes.
Seven Ways Businesses Can Use DevOps to Improve Software Releases, Development Workflows, and Lifecycles
1. Create a self-service IT environment where devs can provision approved resources via push-button deployments, reducing the load on IT and reducing wait times for developers.
2. Optimize the local developer environment using container strategies to create frameworks that run quickly and efficiently without complex set up.
3. Set up continuous integration and delivery systems to speed application release and improve the quality of software.
4. Implement AWS best practices for security, high availability, and cost reduction.
5. Use cloud automation to preserve environments and ensure they can be dynamically instantiated and optimized with minimal maintenance.
6. Implement configuration management systems and processes for streamlined deployments.
7. Establish metrics and monitoring for continuous improvement. Improving overall operations in AWS should also be of high importance. It is tempting to think that security and high availability are a success problem, but in fact, it’s not having proper security in place that can prevent a company from achieving success.
