The modernization of IT and the move to the Cloud has rapidly increased the need for more highly skilled technology professionals. To meet the needs of business today, IT organizations are exploring alternative solutions to hiring full time staff as their need to deliver and reduce time to market has become a key differentiating factor for success. DevOps practices have emerged as one of the key enablers for business agility in this competitive environment. As such, service providers are bringing these highly-desired skills to organizations as a value added offering in the form of DevOps as a service.
This post covers DevOps as a service and how it can transform an IT department.
What Is DevOps?
In general terms, DevOps practices improve software delivery by removing bottlenecks between software development and operations processes. The core tenets of DevOps reduce the handoffs, minimizing delivery failures, and automating tests and deployment through improved communication and automation. In companies that wish to deliver value frequently to their customers, DevOps practices offer direct measurable improvements to lead time as well as reduced failures in production.
Enterprises have traditionally separated building applications from the day-two operations tasks of running or maintaining products. This has often led to conflict and has caused a “wall of confusion” to be formed between IT organizations. This results in much more time spent in manual processes that are disconnected and far less collaboration or innovation.
Employing DevOps practices will allow organizations to streamline their software development and delivery. Additionally, teams that own quality and security are able to implement security and governance much faster than traditional siloed organizations.
Know How to Take Advantage of Cloud Resources
When an IT change would require a prohibitively expensive investment, you'll need to look for an alternative. This is where cloud computing comes in. In the cloud, there are always experienced teams dedicated to services, IT infrastructure, and so on, including DevOps as a service.
Imagine that a company has decided to adopt this model, except that those responsible for IT don't even know where to start. They don't know how to fit this model into their internal processes, nor do they have enough elements to scale the necessary infrastructure. And they know that their current teams don't have the expertise they need to adopt more DevOps practices.
DevOps services can help start you on your journey and build a bridge to new capabilities your IT organization is looking for. Managed service providers offer many benefits such as enablement programs, playbooks, and roadmaps that show how improvements can be made iteratively and measured along the way. In addition, highly trained professionals on the provider's side will be at the customer's disposal, available as needed to assist with new challenges or business demands whenever they arise.
What Is the Function of DevOps as a Service, and How Does It Work?
In many cases, a managed service offering such as DevOps as a service, a provider will be able to bring infrastructure, processes, services, and most importantly, a team at the customer's disposal.
The provider team works closely and collaboratively with the client's IT teams, guiding in-house professionals to maximize the benefits of DevOps as a service. It works constantly to improve efficiency and effectiveness. Using the best tools and processes for the business use case, the collaborative team will implement complete delivery systems via automation and optimization.
DevOps as a service offerings can help improve all of the delivery or operations process in addition to the obvious benefits of software and infrastructure automation. Architects, developers, and support specialists provided by the supplier effectively become an extension of the client's IT team. The client can count on helpful advice from the supplier for everything from planning and design to implementation, configuration, and incident handling.
What Are the Benefits of DevOps as a Service?
Improvement in Software Development and Operations
The wide spectrum of improvements the DevOps methodology provides helps facilitate each stage of your software delivery project. The result of this is greater fluidity and productivity for those involved in the work. This allows the manager to visualize the optimization for the entire team, improving the company's performance for each release.
Due to the ever expanding features and tools that cloud technologies and cloud native development are becoming far more robust and accessible. By working with a service provider, they can help your organization take advantage of these modern technologies by bringing patterns and practices that utilize APIs or SDKs in addition to the knowledge and DevOps skills required to operate effectively in the public cloud ecosystem.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Through automated builds and tests, the practice of continuous integration increases the efficiency of application development and delivery. Continuous integration is a prerequisite for continuous delivery and arguably the most important improvement to the software development process.
Continuous integration , aka “CI”, reduces the manual work required to build and test code during the software development lifecycle. DevOps CI pipelines bring automated code builds, unit testing, integration testing, security scans, and standards that shorten the feedback loop for errors and accelerate software delivery.
Support From Specialized Teams
When a supplier commits to delivering infrastructure and services to support the customer's business, it also commits to providing support. This is important as it allows for a continuous improvement of services and key “day two” operations. The DevOps as a service provider will help facilitate the day to day delivery improvements to processes required to improve the delivery system as a whole.
Increase in IT Resources via Partnerships or Outsourcing
In DevOps as a service model, we are building collaboration between the supplier's teams and the customer's teams, combining the provider's physical resources with those of the contracting party. This “team augmentation” is the primary benefit of partnering with a managed service provider with skilled enablement engineers.
More Advantages to DevOps as a Service
- Delivery acceleration: When you don't have the need for an internal specialized team to deal with DevOps specifics, the developers can focus more on software development, thereby increasing the speed with which they deliver features.
- Raising the quality of IT products: Businesses get greater predictability of the software life cycle and more constant feedback with the adaptation of strategies.
- Cost conscious development: Normally, partnering with companies that provide this service is more cost-effective, as they have specialized professionals focused on managing the infrastructure, so a business doesn't have to hire their own team.
- Maximizing the results of IT teams: The entire development and deployment process takes less time because IT and operations teams work together and make decisions together, thus reducing task execution time.
Getting Started With DevOps as a Service
Partnering with a dedicated team of DevOps consultants will help your organization modernize and improve software delivery on the way to digital transformation.
Maintaining the robust cloud environments that meet the technological needs of the enterprise can be complex. Building and scaling modern IT infrastructure, operations, and software applications requires highly qualified professionals. Partnering with an organization whose primary goal is to meet this demand can be a great solution.
Conclusion
The merging of DevOps with cloud-based architecture and services promises even more possibilities for improving IT services. Automating the provisioning of infrastructure, software builds, the execution of tests, the production of reports, governance, and monitoring are big steps toward innovating the IT sector and ensuring that business solutions are more in line with a company's needs. A DevOps as a service partner can accelerate the creation and adoption of these core competencies in your IT organization.
The goal of DevOps is to deliver value to your customers faster with superior quality. When it comes to DevOps and cloud transformation, Liatrio can help your organization by guiding you through this process and scaling and accelerating your business with our lean approach. It's not just about making a technical difference. It's also about helping you create a new culture through digital transformation.
