The implementation and successful execution of IT initiatives often comes down to developers. From those working with commercial vendors to those working with open source projects, cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, managed service providers (MSPs) and internal teams, they all play an important role in the successful running of IT and operations teams.
One challenge developer and operations teams face is the huge time barrier between development and follow-on operations. What a developer builds today for an organization may continue to be used decades from now, and will likely be maintained, patched, updated and modified by other developers. Though it’s a point of pride for the developer—who will have likely moved on in their career—it can be challenging for the operations team who has to continue to deploy it year after year.
With more applications than ever before, the traditional role of the developer is changing. Today, developers need to start factoring operations cost containment into their responsibilities.
Opportunity for the Developer
Developers are rarely responsible for long-term business decisions. Once code is out of their hands, they often have little to no stewardship of their work. The business will make critical IT cost optimization and containment decisions about its code, language and toolchain epochs later. Developers focus on the now and the near future. Spending hours envisioning the one winning outcome out of 10,000 possibilities years later won’t get code out the door or achieve the delivery goals of their managers.
However, developers have an often-overlooked opportunity to include the gears to activate cost containment support during initial development. From there, if their work is good, it’ll endure; extended support will eventually be necessary. The first step is to ensure new and modernized applications include solid cloud-native monitoring from the outset. This not only helps DevOps and SRE teams but benefits the entire business, who’ll own those applications for the long term.
Integrating operations-focused monitoring is a top priority for developers. In some cases, an application using platform-managed serverless or orchestrated containerization has no shortage of opportunities to provide developers and operations with detailed performance data.
A developer’s expertise with dependency analysis, code maturity and ease of integration is a great measurement tool to evaluate tool durability. A solution capable of easily combining cloud-native application performance details with infrastructure performance, user experience and operational expense data is even more likely to help developers and businesses manage costs in the long run.
A New Dimension
As cloud-native becomes a mainstream enterprise strategy, cost containment is a key opportunity. To meet the future challenges of application management, leadership is rapidly expanding their definition of application suitability and quality to incorporate all aspects of application ownership. For some teams, cost containment is a new dimension of senior developer maturity.
