Real world DevOps - a better way to develop and host software
DevOps is a way of working that builds closer collaboration between software developers and the team that manages the software after it's gone live. It's related to 'agile development' and is partly a response to agile's tendency to increase the frequency of software releases.
In many IT organisations - especially the bigger ones - teams are traditionally separated into different functional areas. Developers write code, testers do quality assurance and the tech services or operations team looks after hosting. DevOps is different - it encourages multidisciplinary teams and it gets software developers much closer to the day to day operational management of the software they build.
Why care about DevOps?
DevOps makes a difference to customers because:
- You get a more responsive service. Developers want to track down and fix bugs and they want to roll out releases to customers quickly. DevOps makes it easier for developers to 'own' the problem. There's no doubt that a DevOps culture cuts some of the internal bureaucracy that can exist between developers and tech services teams, particularly in larger organisations.
- The quality of your software goes up. DevOps is a culture change. Developers, testers and tech services work together to increase overall quality. It's important to understand - DevOps doesn't mean rolling back on quality assurance, rather it means a shared focus on creating processes (often including more automation) that facilitate both quick turnarounds and reliability.
- It makes it easier for you to respond to your users. You begin to think about doing releases more often - so you add new features sooner, closer to when your users ask for them. That's a more agile way of working that will move you away from big development phases and the ever present risk that you build (and pay for) large amounts of functionality that your users don't really want.
- It saves you money. Developers who get more involved in monitoring the performance of an application after it's gone live will build better code - they spot bottlenecks faster and get more performance by optimising code rather than increasing server resource. This especially true in a cloud hosting world where the hosting team might be tempted to quickly increase server resources (and costs) first rather than look at underlying code issues.
The way we work at SkillsLogic is closely aligned to DevOps. We’re a small but focused team that develops and then hosts high performance web applications for some big clients - clients that want software that will support tens of thousands of users. Automated releases, smart server monitoring and developers who understand how to tune application and server software for maximum performance mean we deliver a service that is responsive, high quality and very cost effective for our clients.
