For a successful DevOps adoption, business and enterprises pose a dilemma- should you have an in-house DevOps service, or should you choose DevOps as a Service?
Although there were thousands of explanations on DevOps and its uses, it has been more than 10+ years since DevOps methodology has shaken the digital world, winning the attention of IT executives globally.
According to an Atlassian survey, 99% of IT professionals believed that DevOps positively impacted their organization. It improved the quality of products & services, the time to market them, and the team's performance.
However, the dichotomy is growing even more expansive now that many web development companies are building end-to-end DevOps as Service environments that enable enterprises with quick and repeated tasks for continuous application support.
If you are still deliberating about which DevOps service option is good for you, this article will help you.
The acronym DevOps stands for Development & Operations, and DevOps as a Service is a tool that facilitates collaboration between software development and operations teams within an organization.
The primary purpose of DevOps as a Service is to ensure that the organizations follow strategies like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and successfully achieve the desired outcomes to deliver business value.
Apart from breaking down communication barriers and collaboration between development and IT operations teams, the primary function of DevOps is customer satisfaction and faster delivery. Businesses can propel innovation and continuous process improvement by adopting DevOps services.
The practice of DevOps encourages faster, better, more secure delivery of business value to the end customers. It may take the form of more frequent product releases, features, or updates or how quickly an issue or bug is identified, resolved, and re-released.
Despite the simplicity of the Software Delivery Life Cycle (SDLC) model, it has several defects. It has been observed that in the ever-changing digital world, a business is met with multifaceted problems which require quick fixes. Changes in product development as adding new features, fixing bugs, etc., require it to go through at least 4-5 silos in traditional SDLC, causing delays and increasing costs.
Here are a few challenges that traditional SDLC face.
The traditional SDLC method separates the software developers, test engineers, and maintenance teams into three groups where they perform the operations one after the other. The developers can't cooperate with the test engineers or operation teams assigned to maintain the stability of the software. Thus the lack of communication, along with an isolated structure of departments, not only resulted in a time-consuming approach but also led to an uncoordinated and faulty approach.
Traditional SDLC conducts tests individually in unit forms. For better & higher functionality and detection of flaws, individual testing isn't enough to create a standard quality output. The process makes the test engineers fail to continue testing due to fixed silos of departments. Thus with these loopholes, the development team ends up with issues like post-release bugs and delays in marketing the product.
Due to fixed isolated work stages, the final result has significant gaps, which leads to rework. Also, the lack of integration and collaboration makes the development team work overtime and fail to respond to the users' complaints in the stipulated time.
Without transparency between the software testing engineers and developers fixing a bug and making new changes may take weeks or even months. It will be difficult for businesses to market their product on time using traditional methods; if they repeatedly fail to deliver the project.
Now the question arises, how can a business move ahead in the competitive market and become more efficient in delivering the best features to the end-users in the set time?
Well, the answer is- through DevOps as a Service.
Here are a few prime benefits a business can enjoy after adopting DevOps as a Service:
The driving force of every business is delivering better customer value, and using DevOps as a Service enables your tech teams to align technology to your core business. Businesses that follow a robust DevOps Strategy can provide more value to their customers by removing automated and repetitive processes.
Thus the DevOps team provides you with more time to spend focusing on innovating and enhancing technology quality, along with high-quality solutions to your customers faster.
A robust DevOps process encourages agility within the development and operations team. The development team can change the platform and roll out new features on the fly. As the DevOps service teams are constantly running through testing and deployment, it is easier to fix bugs and patch issues as they arise and can respond to customer needs quickly. Thus cycle time is drastically reduced because iteration is built into the process.
Similar to how DevOps reduces cycle time, it also speeds up the time to market your project/product because it allows teams to move faster. Using DevOps methodology, businesses can accelerate the development process and its ability to scale. It gives teams quick customer feedback on products, reducing response time to customer’s requests.
The key factor of using DevOps is that it aligns the company's people and resources around the same goals. You can drive new efficiencies through increased visibility and communication when your development and operations teams work together. Development teams are centered around releases, updates, and deployment, so any problems that arise can be fixed faster using DevOps.
It’s no secret that making your business agile can help you to stay ahead in the market. Thanks to DevOps managed service providers who can make it possible for your business to scale and enable you to focus on your core activities.
DevOps is all about using the process for accessible communication, elimination of silos, and promotion of collaboration, making them focused on their specialized field. Incorporating DevOps-as-a-service has led to an upsurge in productivity and efficiency among the employees of a company.
According to Glassdoor, DevOps Engineer' is ranked 5th of the ten best jobs in the US with a minimum salary of $110,003. This means you're paying out each month more than $9,000 (AVG) to a DevOps specialist plus overheads and taxes- 40% more than the average US salary of a professional in the US.
Whereas DevOps as a Service team has top professionals, enabling you to quickly deploy your products and focus on streamlining and simplifying SDLC. As well as cutting costs, you save time and money on recruiting and onboarding new team members, thus reducing the risk of staff turnover.
For better clarity, let's find out the pros and cons of an in-house DevOps team and A Remote DevOps Team.
Affordable Talents: The glassdoor survey confirms the average salary of a DevOps engineer is $110,003 whereas in the UK is £48,518, in Canada C$82,231, and in India is $20,084. Whereas when you hire remote engineers, you can look for affordable talents across the globe for your product development.
When an enterprise is working hand-to-hand with a Remote DevOps team, the business’s expenses can considerably decrease by 50% and, as a consequence, help you to save costs.
Remote workplaces for DevOps exponentially increase worker productivity more efficiently, thus benefiting both employers and employees- lowering stress and distractions, and leading to higher work efficiency in the cloud world.
Here are a few services that you may expect from DevOps as a Service Company.
The key objectives of DevOps process setup are speed, quality, and business agility. DevOps teams collect, analyze, and measure metrics that are aligned with the critical business goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
DevOps as a Service company thus facilitates organizations with a well-researched plan for DevOps transformation through setting out roadmaps for continuous integration and deployment.
This practice involves ongoing monitoring of both the code in operation and the underlying infrastructure. It provides a feedback loop on bugs or issues and then makes its way back to development.
The remote DevOps team monitors the entire process from planning to development to integrating to testing in the software development life cycle.
This practice brings together test and development tools to track how much of the code being developed is ready for production. It also automates the release of new or changed code into production.
A remote DevOps team can help you chalk out a phased approach for CI/CD automation throughout the development, testing, integration, and deployment phases.
It is a practice that incorporates automated, prescheduled, continued code tests when application code is being written or updated. This test can speed up the delivery of code to production.
With this approach, the remote team can also ensure that the product is tested thoroughly across each stage of the development process.
It is mainly used for applications hosted on cloud platforms and large distributed applications. The DevOps team uses Agile development so that integration and delivery can be continuous. They also help to run and manage your software on cloud through server management.
The feature in DevOps helps to record changes to files stored in the system. These files can be source code, assets, or other documents that might be part of a software development project. It secures your organization's tech assets from any internal or external threats with the help of security management services.
DevOps engineers use this feature in legacy systems and modern environments that helps to streamline the code-change lifecycle along with automated tools to manage development and deployment quickly.
Companies today understand that if they want to increase their competitiveness in today’s swiftly changing world, they can’t ignore digital transformation and DevOps. Although the relationship between the two is often confusing, DevOps is about process and process improvement whereas cloud migration is about technology and services.
Therefore, it’s important to understand how cloud managed services and DevOps as a service work together to help businesses achieve their transformation goals. While the cloud itself has several definitions, the most basic definition is that it allows the provisioning of infrastructure. Infrastructure monitoring is crucial for ensuring system reliability. It constantly tracks code and infrastructure, promptly detecting and reporting issues, fostering a seamless integration between development and operations. After - then makes its way back to development.
And the beauty of cloud services and why they become so easily intermingled in DevOps vocabulary is that they complement DevOps processes regardless of which way your organization defines them.
In simple language, using DevOps as a service can help organizations develop applications that need frequent and rapid deployment whereas cloud managed service can provide the ideal environment for DevOps automation due to its central nature.
It is crucial for companies to adopt CloudOps- Cloud and DevOps together to craft and adhere to a strategy that leads to stability and consistency.
Obviously, not all remote DevOps teams offer high-quality services. How do you choose a reliable one? Here are the points you should consider when looking to hire a remote DevOps team.
Look for their previous clients of the DevOps team, and see what feedback those clients give about the collaboration. Also, check their portfolio about the kind of work they have done in the past. See if they have worked on a similar project like yours before.
It is essential to pay attention to what goals and rules the remote team follow, and if they put the interests of their clients first.
Clarify how your remote DevOps team will communicate with administrators, how promptly they will answer your messages, and how quickly your tasks will be solved. Check if they offer 24/7 emergency support.
Saving cost is one the essential factors when it comes to hiring a remote DevOps team. Apart from cutting down costs, partnering with the best DevOps team can also scale up your business. Also, a remote DevOps team has a wide range of talents and experts that your in-house DevOps team may lack.
In this article, we have tried reducing your dilemma of choosing an in-house DevOps team to DevOps as a service provider. Remote DevOps engineers not only simplify product development, and improve communication between individual project teams, but also save the company money.
At Classic Informatics, we have enormous experience with DevOps and leverage DevOps best practices to ensure transparency, collaboration, and cross-functionality of your teams, and lead you to DevOps success.