Boost your development with a DevOps culture and services that improves technology processes and gives your developers more time for coding. At the heart of DevOps culture is a united and shared identity between development, testing and operations teams, and a recognition of common goals.
DevOps is a combination of culture, philosophy and tools bringing new vision to the development process and all processes linked to it: testing, integrations and deployment. Adopting DevOps practices means giving your company an upsurge in its ability to speed up delivery of applications and services, reducing downtimes thus increasing availability, simplifying management processes and provisioning infrastructure. We believe that description suits companies of all sizes well: whether a small startup or big product company. Here is what we do in this context:
There is no one-size-fits-all topology for team cooperation. DevOps topology provides nine types of collaboration between Dev and Ops:
1. Dev+Ops – smooth collaboration based on high technical competence: sharing when needed, specializing when necessary.
2. Fully-Shared Ops – administrators are tightly integrated into one development team sharing the same goal.
3. Ops as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) – combination of a traditional administration department and a special team that acts as a source of expertise.
4. DevOps as a Service – external teams act as service providers helping small companies challenged by typical deployment issues but have neither a DevOps department nor experts.
5. Temporary DevOps Team – short-term team focuses on bringing developers and administrators together to be able to recognize and value one another’s role, improve communication and increase software delivery workflow.
6. DevOps Evangelists – suits organizations with a large communication gap between these two departments. DevOps facilitates regular communication between departments ensuring they know about each other’s capabilities and do not drift apart.
7. SRE Team – in this model, DevOps is the connecting link between developers and the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team providing evidence that the software meets operational standards.
8. Container-Driven Deployment – by deploying software into containers, DevOps significantly decreases time and number of issues. Containers work as a boundary between areas of responsibilities of both teams.
9. DBA Capability – DevOps team helps development team and DBA team collaborate on development and maintenance of large data bases.
The right DevOps strategy depends on project size and scope. It also depends on team skills, distribution of roles on a project, and established communication.
Btw: our DevOps engineers can handle all of these roles.
Short answer: optimization and automation.
The range of a DevOps team’s activities is wide and highly contextual. They usually focus on issues related to app deployment, app infrastructure optimization, and alignment of processes across developers and administrators.
What are the most important components of DevOps?
| IT automation | 52% |
| Agile development | 47% |
| Collaborative teaming between dev & ops | 45% |
| Service virtualization | 42% |
| Accalerated applications testing | 32% |
| Continuous release cycles | 32% |
| Aligned processes across dev & ops | 25% |
| Pre-production performance testing | 4% |
Typically, what DevOps does on a project:
The DevOps team engages in smooth software delivery, thus saving on routine tasks / app maintenance expenses.
DevOps is a recent approach that has become mainstream. As with anything new, it might fall short where old traditions are rooted.
Development culture. As mentioned above, there are several successful DevOps models. Apart from choosing a suitable model, everyone involved in the software delivery process should be aware of the other parties involved, their roles in the project sharing the same goal and a common view on software development process. Otherwise, teams simply might not appreciate one another and start resisting the efforts of others.
Tools. There are many tools and utilities, both open-source and proprietary. The problem is each team must be aware of how to use them properly. If they don’t know how, they can damage software integrity and impact its security. Training and expertise are crucial.
Workflow tuning. Introduction of DevOps into established workflows might require changes in the workflows to eliminate overlap of roles and to align responsibilities across departments. It can be very challenging, especially for teams following specific guidelines or having fixed views on software development. To make DevOps effective, there must be a common vision to avoid dividing development, DevOps, and administration into separate workstations but instead uniting them into a harmonized process.
Security is one of DevOps’s guiding principles. No one is going to deploy a new piece of code without having it reviewed, tested for bugs, examined on security compliance, etc. On the contrary, while DevOps helps with faster delivery time, it ensures a quicker patch to secure any breaches.
DevOps helps security team audit infrastructures, environments, and internal processes for vulnerabilities and respond accordingly.
DevOps helps you in the same way Agile does: it grants your project more flexibility in changing requirements and enables a shorter delivery timeline.
- DevOps’ approach makes it possible to deploy software faster. Also, it ensures more frequent releases of updates seamlessly across many platforms. The result is improved quality of software and ensured integrity of solutions.
- Furthermore, DevOps focuses on automation, thus saving developers, QA teams, and administrators’ time on routine tasks like deployment of environments. And because everyone works using the same environment, it also ensures software consistency. The result is increased operational efficiency.
- Another benefit of having DevOps on a project is infrastructure optimization. DevOps engineers analyze resources a software application uses and inactivate everything unnecessary. This results in cost savings on app maintenance.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has long recognized the importance of DevOps practices for the consistency of software development. Hence, AWS promotes a DevOps approach to help simplify software deployment and get control over the use of app resources.
We love AWS because it supports DevOps with different tools to automate manual tasks, monitor infrastructure, scale with ease, manage software environment, and much more. This makes cheaper, consistent software maintenance possible.
As mentioned above, there are many open-source instruments available for DevOps. Here is a list of tools our DevOps team usually works with and for what purposes:
Of note, during the preliminary stage when starting a new project—no matter how big or small—the IT Craft team investigates how well our instruments correspond to the scope of the project. When there is a tool better suited for your project that is not included on our list, we are happy to adopt it to our workflow.
Every industry. No exceptions.
Any development team that benefits from Agile approach to software development will benefit from continuous delivery.
Just to name a few industries that have already used DevOps as a competitive advantage:
The list keeps growing. Will the next success story will be yours?
The metrics to determine success of a DevOps team depend largely on the nature of the project.
The report What Smart Businesses Know about DevOps divides the criteria of DevOps effectiveness into external and internal.
| External factors | Internal factors |
| Lowering deployment costs | Improved communication on the project |
| Delivery time | Improved efficiency of team work |
| Increased deployment frequency | Fewer bugs |
| Improved quality of deployed apps | Increased ROI |
| Revenue increase | Availability across many platform |
Hence, DevOps delivers measurable results on a project both helping businesses acquire new customers with improved quality and lowering labor effort through automation and fine-tuning development workflow.
Read some of success stories in our post “How We Help Our Clients Reduce Their Expenses On Amazon AWS Hosting”.
The boost up of the following projects was hardly possible without DevOps
