How is DevOps charting a new model for cloud development?

There are some pivotal things that separate low performing businesses from high performing enterprises substantially. Factors like frequent deployments, fast load times, expedited recovery time, and lowered change failure rate have been defining enterprises’ success in the last few years. 

While startups have been addressing this gap by investing in cloud architecture, they have started realizing that it’s time to step up the architecture and look for a more robust and fail-fast solution. A solution they are finding in DevOps for cloud.

At the center of it, implementing DevOps in cloud development would mean integrating the development and operations team in a way that automates the agile methodology and eliminates the delay around software development. This combination of DevOps with cloud, has emerged as an organic merger between two speed and quality centric development approaches. One that both enterprises and cloud providers are adopting. 

Cloud and DevOps: An organic link

The reason behind enterprises using DevOps automation services is to respond to the business needs in semi real-time – a solution that has historically been advertised as a cloud offering. On the back of this, it is very easy to connect the dots between the two approaches.

• The centralized model of cloud computing approach offers DevOps automation a centralized and standard platform for software creation, its testing, and deployment. This, in the olden days (sans cloud based DevOps) faced a lag as the distributed mode of some of the enterprise software didn’t integrate well with the centralized software deployment requirement. 
• Majority of the cloud computing providers now support DevOps on their platforms, in addition to extensive continuous integration and continuous development. This close integration brings down the cost around on-premises automation of DevOps cloud development and provides a centralized governance over the process. The acceptance of cloud platforms shapes the answer to how cloud computing helps in DevOps transition.
• Cloud-based DevOps lowers the need to keep an account of the utilized resources. Cloud follows a usage-based accounting model that tracks the resource use by developer, application, user, and data, etc. The traditional non DevOps cloud infrastructure didn’t offer this service, leading to difficulty in tracking the cost of development resources. The factor answers how DevOps supports the cloud native approach.

Now that we have looked into the organic connection between DevOps and cloud computing, it is critical to know what is bringing this shift in the software development domain and why should businesses shift their focus to implement DevOps in the cloud.

Why is DevOps in cloud development becoming the new norm?

The reason why developers prefer DevOps is to simplify and speed up the development process. But at the same time, they know that the integration of only DevOps (sans cloud approach) cannot be their one-stop solution as making it a part of the process requires making capital investments in software, hardware – things that make developers put deployment on hold. 

Together DevOps and cloud deployment offers a range of significant benefits.

• A streamlined development methodology and access to the real-time development environments brings down the software go-to-market time using the DevOps based cloud model.
• DevOps for cloud comes with an infrastructure as code approach which when used with the automation tools lowers the system maintenance and cloud complexity.
• The automation of repeatable methods eradicates the probability of errors while building a robust security control architecture in the DevOps cloud platform.
• The cloud based DevOps model comes with continuous operations that not just eliminate downtime issues but also allow developers to create stateless applications that, in turn, improves the availability of applications – causing high customer satisfaction.
• When you implement DevOps in cloud, it greatly increases the scalability of organizations while lowering the cost of infrastructure and increasing the global reach.

These benefits of using cloud with DevOps redefine how we approach digitalization in enterprises. However, while theoretically DevOps for cloud have massive merits, what matters is how it translates into the actual development cycle.

What does cloud DevOps services mean for the software development process?

Cloud and DevOps together play a critical role in setting up the ways speed and productivity is defined in an enterprise. But what does it mean for the software development process? For one, it helps solve the many challenges associated with working on a waterfall development approach related to speed and efficiency.

Development

A majority of cloud-based tools allow enterprises to automate the development process. That added to the easy integration of DevOps principles such as continuous development, continuous integration, and continuous delivery, it becomes easy and quick to automate the build process through the DevOps for cloud model. This high level of automation doesn’t just expedite the development speed but also eliminates the probability of human errors.

Testing

The association between DevOps and cloud services backs innovation in software development. Unlike waterfall development, no time is wasted for servers or hardware to get free as cloud-based servers offer the developers an architecture to test the codes or new features.

The level of productivity and efficiency that comes at the back of integrating DevOps with cloud is something that would require partnering with teams that specialize in merging cloud computing services with DevOps. But before you get to that stage, it would help to set up a process for DevOps cloud infrastructure.

The future of software belongs to DevOps based cloud

As DevOps for cloud continue to validate their combined value to businesses, technology leads have started working on solving the technical and organizational challenges. However, this would require a change in mindset specifically around adding cloud to the DevOps environment.

If they plan on using cloud computing in processes, they must use DevOps to help the technology reach its potential. It is impossible to get the outcome by keeping them in silos and not working synergistically. The changes and probabilities that we have described in the article points to an uncharted territory – one which would require DevOps cloud infrastructure to be understood and integrated. 

This is where it becomes necessary to partner with DevOps consulting services providers with dedicated DevOps and cloud architects. They can help enterprises chart the agile DevOps and cloud digital transformation journey, ensuring that the software development journey backs innovation and remains fail-fast.

THE AUTHOR

Sudeep Srivastava

Co-Founder and Director