DevOps takes an increasingly prominent place in the line of IT trends. This is no surprise when you consider that DevOps carries the potential to solve one of the most important issues of today: how can I innovate and accelerate my innovation processes?
The DevOps philosophy connects the world of development – which has a strong focus on innovation – to the world of operations – which has a strong focus on stability. Within a DevOps culture, developers and administrators work in close collaboration in agile processes during the entire life cycle of a service or application.
In order to adopt DevOps, an infrastructure is needed which is standardised, flexible and efficient, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). IaaS is able to accelerate the software development process. In the traditional situation, a development team would often have to wait to start a new project until an infrastructure is available that they can use. Studies show that this waiting period could run up to a month and will therefore present an obstacle for the team.
Self-service
An IaaS platform makes it possible to remove these obstacles. To start with, the team will have the required hardware and software at their disposal much faster thanks to this type of service. IaaS is based on the principles of self-service and auto-provisioning, which development teams can use to generate their own resources. In addition, you can use an IaaS platform to increase the quality of the software you develop by working in a standardised environment, which closely resembles the production environment. This will increase the chances that bugs and issues will be identified and resolved at an early stage.
All of this does not need to lead to huge investments. As soon as the software is developed and tested, the resources can be switched off again and the costs will stop. High quality also means more value for the organisation, since the software is available to end users earlier, giving the opportunity to provide feedback to facilitate fine-tuning. This approach allows the complete development cycle to be shortened without any negative effects on quality.
Collaboration
Deploying an IaaS platform also supports a better collaboration between every party in the development process, including developers, quality managers and the security and compliance teams. All the stakeholders have easy access to a standardised infrastructure environment which closely resembles the production environment. This enables them to ask the proper questions and solve possible issues quickly.
This approach provides continuous delivery to automate all the processes that can be automated. For example, a new software release, which development delivers to operations and subsequently gets rolled out across several OTAP environments, will be far more sensitive to errors when it is done manually instead of by a straightforward automated process, including automated testing procedures. This increases efficiency and decreases the risk of errors. The choice to support this process with an IaaS service will ensure an increase in quality, an acceleration in software development and options for flexible upscaling or downscaling, since there is no need for substantial capital investments for all the development activities.
