Overhauling the Development Cycle to Benefit From New-Age DevOps

IT infrastructure has evolved so much in the past decade that developers could operate remotely during the pandemic without hassles. Even the project managers were at ease, given the intuitive tools they had at hand that simplified the entire development pipeline. The work has never been more efficient, and the tracking has never been easier. This is owed to the advent of automation technologies in business processes that are believed to be crucial by 97% of organizations. The BPA market is forecasted to double in six years ending 2026, reaching $19.6 billion. Cloud-native practices allow remote work and real-time updates that help development teams to stay put with the issues in the system while also allowing them the opportunity to solve the problems as and when they occur.

Need for Transformation

Business growth depends on the scalability of its processes, which comes through digital transformation. The current phase of automation has been about putting in-place cyber-physical systems for a more diversified infrastructure with more outstanding capabilities. As per Gartner, cloud platforms such as AWS will host 95% of digital workloads by 2025. Industrial Revolution 4.0 calls for a robust digital ecosystem that allows a seamless integration of IoT technologies and strives for advanced automation. As businesses of all scales need to achieve economies of scale, they need access to technologies and serverless frameworks for conducting their operations cost-effectively.

The best way to go about digitalization is to create new pathways for value creation through data and IT systems. The seamless exchange of data is an essential aspect of the automation process as data is the currency in the disruptive world of big data, and real-time response is the key to success. Those capable of quickly adapting to the changing business environment are best positioned to make a mark in the market.  Cloud computing strategies are expected to be adopted by 85% of business entities by 2025, with a CAGR of 20% for cloud DevOps.

Importance of Transformation in Development

The collaborative aspects of development can be achieved through approaches such as the linear sequential life cycle model, aka the waterfall model. The primary purpose of this model, say, for example, was to create a thorough process divided into non-overlapping phases so that the process becomes efficient. This was an excellent start to bringing agile methodology alive in the System Development Lifecycle (SDLC). This model had the incredible advantage of simplicity while having a sequential process flow for achieving the benchmarked outcomes. The well-defined milestones make the process streamlined and achievable. The loopholes of the model are that the process is too risky as there is no software output until the very end, and it is highly unsuitable for object-oriented processes that might encounter changing requirements and difficulty in assessing mid-phase progress. 

These drawbacks led to innovation in the development operations that allowed managers and developers to identify bottlenecks earlier. Agile methodologies aim for a quicker time-to-market such that the processes are highly customizable while revenue cycles are enhanced. DevOps uses a continuous feedback loop for collaborating with agile operations across the value chain, making them more responsive to the customers’ preferences and expectations from the process. The core function of DevOps is to troubleshoot issues in the development life cycle and make changes for better results through suitable workflows. Cloud DevOps has simplified the integration process with other applications that perform specialized tasks using coding as a service, making it more efficient than traditional ops. Financial services benefit substantially through a development cadence of over 200 times faster than the traditional process.

Various Aspects of DevOps Integration

Businesses need to adapt to market changes as the uncertainty level is high in the business environment. Those who fail to adapt are bound to succumb to the adversities of business. They will then be responsible for not being able to keep up with the needs of the company and its various stakeholders. DevOps is meant to integrate processes with resources and relevant people to break the barriers of departmental functions. In the modern cross-functional business environment, sticking to a fixed path for performing linear functions does not turn out to be as beneficial. There is value in inter-departmental collaboration, which can be accessed through DevOps cloud practices.

The line between the development and deployment of application software has blurred to the extent that these can be done simultaneously in an open architecture. Lean production practices have helped build a lot upon the methods of development operations through better time and resource management. The idea is to optimize the development and production processes as much as possible. Agility is only valuable when it is coupled with reliability that reduces the instances of failure, which has been documented as 7 times lower by adopters in the financial development industry. DevOps tries to achieve this rare combination of advantages to improve overall performance. This value proposition has poised DevOps to reach $30 billion in 2028, as predicted by Global Market Insights. 

Evaluating the Efficacy of DevOps & Cloud Strategies

The versatility of cloud architecture can be leveraged to develop and test code in a dynamic environment. The distributed nature of a cloud architecture makes way for piecemeal testing through granular iterations in a continuous manner. This falls into the DevOps architecture’s continuous improvement (CI) aspect. With the option for CI in an ongoing process, there is also the possibility for continuous development (CD) that arises out of the need to improve the procedures while they are up and running. CD mechanism allows developers to make real-time updates to the software without affecting the operational pipeline. Creating multiple pipelines for a process with a broad scope of possibilities is possible by integrating DevOps methodology, not only for the IT processes but also across the organizational processes.

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To create a CI/CD culture of production, businesses need to be technology-centric in all aspects. This is all the more important in the finance sector as the need for automated quality assurance cannot be overemphasized. As much as external metrics like customer satisfaction are vital, the internal metrics of employee turnover, healthy work culture, and ethical operations are sometimes more critical. The ethical dilemmas can be resolved through protecting different components with firewall isolation, managing storage redundancy for the safekeeping of financial data, and separating roles.

Process metrics need to align with the overall business objectives for a successful DevOps initiative. Only when the people operating the processes have the confidence and required skillsets to bring the requisite change in the systems, can DevOps be a real game-changer. The overhauled system architecture should not pose itself as a liability because that will be detrimental to revenues in a financial app that relies on enhanced transaction speed. The downtime from improvement becomes zero in DevOps as the virtual cloud servers manage to keep the older versions running until newer versions of apps are patched on immutable servers. This switch-over process faces the issues of maintainability in traditional development. DevOps has accustomed users to having 24*7 access to finance in a decentralized ecosystem.

DevOps is a Win-Win for All

There is an excellent proposition of security and creativity in software architecture. Tracking performance is a cakewalk with the ability to define metrics as per need. Having a set of KPIs based on empirical evidence allows for building algorithms for employee compensation while also keeping the customer satisfied. Plus, these can be customized in accordance with the shifting customer behavior. The rest will fall into place so long as the process fulfills the business needs and there’s a well-illustrated roadmap to align them.

Contact the team at Opus to know how you can reduce the time to market with DevOps.