Why DevOps is essential?

I am Lok Raj Ghimire, currently working as a program manager for Consoltica for more than 4 years.  As a program manager, I frequently work simultaneously on multiple long-term and short-term projects. I am not only in constant contact with the internal team of developers but also in coordinating ongoing communication with clients and ensuring that everyone is on the same page in terms of timeline and expectations.  I worked very closely with the creative team. So, I’m familiar with the pressures that come with the projects and the nuances of interfacing with both clients and the development team.

In this role, I have practicing traditional as well as modern software development systems. From my experience following are some problems in the traditional system that I have observed during my career.

1. High costs and wasted budgets

Traditional methods can be quite costly and often 64% of the budgets spent on developing these methods are wasted on developing features that may not be used or required by the customer.

2. Unproductive?

During the development process, there can be large disconnects between the customer (the business) and the development team.

3. Changes difficult and costly

Traditional methods, in particular the Waterfall model, can be very rigid to change. 

4. Management Bottlenecks

Traditional software development projects require rigorous approvals. Therefore, management time can be wasted during these as many managers' approvals are required.

5. Lack of transparency

While those overseeing software development projects are often inundated with numerous status reports, frequently they have little to no insight into real progress. 

DevOps is a set of practices that works to automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams, so they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably.

In a DevOps environment, the entire team is responsible for delivering both new features and stability. The combination of a shared codebase, continuous integration, test-driven techniques, and automated deploys, among other things, exposes problems—in application code, infrastructure, or configuration—earlier in the process because the code isn’t  “thrown over the wall” to operations at the end of coding.

There are lots of benefits of DevOps. some of these are as:

1.      The Three Ways

Thinking about the system, retrieving signals from the system, and sending them back to the beginning of the system for improvement is the three ways principle.

2.      Making work visible

One important aspect of making work visible is capturing all the work that the team is responsible for. Using a KanBan board can help to capture the work that is happening.

Benefits of Making Work Visible

• Create a common frame of reference

• Expose friction and bottlenecks in processes

• See pain points together (i.e., create empathy)

• Reduce work in progress

• Swarm to problems together

• Generate multiple perspectives

• Document work in real-time

• Uncover areas of improvement

• Create greater awareness for all

The implementation of DevOps leads to the elimination of manual and toilsome management of host configuration. Both the operational work and configuration will systemically get managed through code.

Benefits of implementing DevOps bringing the organization work culture by Changing the mentality of teams from “I have done my job” to “the product/feature is now ready to be deployed”. This is what DevOps is all about.