The main motivation behind inventing DevOps platform was to help close collaboration between developers and IT operations. Basically, DevOps emerged as a great platform to bring closer together developers and beneficiaries of the app development process. DevOps initiates a cross-disciplinary practice spanning across development and operations.
The ultimate benefit of the DevOps approach is removing the barrier between development and deployment of software applications in specific business processes. Regardless, not all businesses reap the benefits of DevOps platform.
Does DevOps really suit all businesses of different sizes and niches? What are the key considerations for utilizing DevOps platform? These are the questions we will try to answer through this article.
Do All Businesses Require DevOps?
The common and widespread consensus is that any software development company geared for innovation must embrace a DevOps environment. Any business that considers innovation and smooth deployment in the software development process—a key factor in their long-term growth strategy—should take advantage of the benefits of a DevOps platform. Whenever any service provider needs to adopt new strategies to keep pace with the evolution in the software space, DevOps will come as an irreplaceable platform choice.
Despite this consensus and widely accepted perception, there are different opinions in the market. Many industry experts believe that to reap the benefit of the platform you need to have a dedicated DevOps team in place. If you have a DevOps culture and in-house DevOps team in your company, you can gain a competitive advantage.
The Key Benefits of DevOps
The main benefit of DevOps is faster delivery of software with much-improved quality. There can be several other benefits depending on the industry.
While some companies refer to the huge reduction in downtime since they adopted DevOps culture, there are still many others who simply give credit to the platform because of its integrated approach that makes the process more agile and fast-paced.
For most companies, the domino effect of getting better software at a faster speed ends up delivering sustainable growth and revenue opportunities.
Here’s a look at the role of DevOps platform across three types of businesses: small companies and startups, midsize companies and large business houses.
Small Companies and Startups
In smaller companies and startups where resources and human capital remain under-supplied, the responsibilities ascribed to developers, engineers and deployment professionals often tend to get blurred or overlap. Because of the scarcity of human resource, developers and engineers are often assigned multiple responsibilities. Naturally, in such companies, it is common to see cross-functional teams ready to engage into various development projects with ease. This makes them ideal business organizations to embrace and grow with DevOps culture.
Midsize Companies
As the companies tend to grow bigger in size and resources, they have a bigger (and often unbreachable) divide between verticals such as operations and development. In such organizations, staff are less likely to be open to cross-functional responsibilities, as many have been in the same job doing the same tasks and feel settled. This brings in a stagnant organizational process, where strong departmental divide rules the business process outcome.
This stagnant work culture makes such companies less appropriate candidates to implement DevOps environment. For these companies to reap the benefits of a DevOps platform, mass organizational changes should be brought in the team structure. Building a separate cross-functional DevOps team to handle some focus projects can also be good practice for them.
Large Companies
Large companies enjoy the luxury and abundance of resources, and this makes them much better-placed compared to other organizations. Companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have the diversity, huge experience and robust abilities to bring together cross-functional specialists from development and operations to work on ambitious projects. These organizations are known for having product-oriented units, comprising specialists from both development and operations.
Apart from their cross-functional expertise, product-focused approach and abundance of resources to roll on new projects, large companies also can make a big difference to the teamwork and motivation through a highly unified vision and strategic long-term objectives shared by every member of each team. This is why large companies always stand as suitable candidates to embrace DevOps approach and environment for their projects.
Fixing the Right DevOps Strategy: 3 Things to Consider
Beyond the organizational differences and core strengths and weakness for embracing a cross-functional DevOps approach, we must look into the key aspects that make a right strategy for any organization to incorporate DevOps into their scheme of things. Question is, despite the shortcomings and lacking, how can you embrace DevOps environment and reap the benefits? Here we provide some clues:
- Making Change a Habit. Some strategists believe that any organizational change will face a lot of friction, causing substantial harm to the immediate business outcome. But there should be no reluctance to change for this. Rather, by bringing constant changes, people get used to the friction and pain and it becomes normal. This is one way to replace traditional IT mindset with DevOps.
- Starting Small with a Neat Team. Obviously, finding the appropriate and credible skilled employee for your DevOps projects is not always easy. This is why it is advisable to create small startups or units, in which sharing the common vision and embracing a cross-functional approach becomes the order of the day. On top of that, do your best to bring out the best from your team and hire some experienced ones with knowledge of DevOps.
- Continuous Development Mindset. We all know how the DevOps platform always focuses on continuous development approach. It is easier for the software developers to embrace such approach, but for operations staff, you have to slowly make them think of infrastructure as evolving and slowly building components. That’s something challenging but not impossible.
Conclusion
DevOps has emerged as the most promising development approach for modern software developers. Though for many development companies the friction emanating from strict role divides is becoming an obstacle, the positive push by DevOps for cross-functional approach looks indomitable.
