A Quick Primer on Developer Operations
With more and more of every business’s operations being handled in the cloud, software development and IT infrastructure teams have become critical to the successful management and scaling of every organization. In the past, professionals were siloed, and that made sense, because it required two distinct skillsets to be a Software Developer or an Infrastructure Engineer. This method worked in the early 21st century as the Internet was ascending in prominence, but it still wasn’t ubiquitous the way it is today.
Now, software updates and hardware upgrades are available far more quickly than they were in the past. With technology advancing at an exponential rate, businesses who rely on the old ways of doing things can be left behind by competitors if they don’t find new ways of iterating on the digital assets of their business.
This is where the Developer Operations (DevOps) team comes in.
What is DevOps?
Broadly speaking, DevOps is a digital development strategy focused on providing software more efficiently. DevOps teams combine cultural philosophies, best practices, and tools that span the functions of software development and operations to deploy updates quickly and iterate often, creating a more stable and functional end-product than might otherwise be possible.
At its core, DevOps teams are about collaboration between the traditionally siloed teams that handle software development and IT operations. Creating a cross-functional team enables many processes to be streamlined, eliminating redundant policies for the different functions of the business and creating opportunities for workflow automation that would have been impossible otherwise.
What are the Benefits of the DevOps Approach?
Eliminating redundant policies and automating workflows are often reasons in and of themselves to make changes to your procedures, but there are plenty of ways to do that doesn’t necessarily require implementing a DevOps approach in your business. So, why should you consider using DevOps in your business?
Here are a few key ways DevOps can benefit your business:
Speed
DevOps teams leverage a microservices and continuous delivery strategies, meaning that instead of creating one big software package, they break up the development process into a series of smaller services that can be then put through builds, test, and deployment workflows automatically.
Increased Reliability
Integration of development and operations means that your team will have much better responsiveness to suggested changes and can integrate them seamlessly into the development process. Many DevOps teams utilize continuous integration practices, which automates code changes in a software project and enables developers to merge code changes into a centralized area for construction and testing of new projects. Doing so means that DevOps teams can expedite the process of fixing software bugs, improving quality, validating software updates, and releasing them into the necessary systems.
Better Security
With a highly integrated, collaborative team, your software projects are being monitored by the same team throughout their development cycle. This makes it easy to plan, develop, integrate, deploy, and maintain new programs, but it also enables your company to catch bugs and security risks before ever sending it to the end-user. In many cases, DevOps teams can leverage Shift Left Security protocols to identify vulnerabilities in new code during the development phase of the project and correct it in the workflow. Additionally, once a project is out the door, DevOps teams identify ways to integrate mechanisms for monitoring application performance so any glitches can be rectified before they become a severe issue.
The Case for DevOps
Most businesses have some difficulty staying up to date on the latest technology, but this can present a risk of falling behind the competition. Organizations have adopted a variety of protocols like Agile and TPS to help expedite production of software updates and projects, and these can be highly effective on their own. However, few methods can bypass the inefficiencies that come baked into company structures where IT operations and software development are siloed from one another the way that putting together a DevOps team can. Even if you’re not looking to overhaul your business’s organizational chart, implementing a DevOps team can help expedite the iterative process that comes with any program development undertaking, leading to faster go-to-market and a better overall experience for end users.
How Hammer Dev Employs DevOps Concepts in Azure Cloud Solutions
Microsoft’s Azure platform continues to expand and enhance. Considered by most to be a best-in-class cloud landscape to facilitate any and all business IT solutions, Microsoft has identified and stressed the importance of a cloud platform to “be” a DevOps platform. In fact, the technology giant even has marketing for the cloud stack that suggests that Azure is the “cloud with developer services built right in”.
In conjunction and coordination with Hammer Tech, Hammer Dev is positioned to provide best in class cloud native solution deployments:
- Hammer Tech: Facilitates and consults in best practice Azure tenant standups, cloud resource setup, configuration, and security & entitlements.
- Hammer Dev: Not only are we experts in architectures of application, data, and automation solutions, but we also utilize various tools / platforms – such as Azure DevOps and GitHub – to perform:
- DevOps project administration and management
- Code repository administration
- Deployment pipelines that include automation in both testing and code promotion from Development, to Staging / Test, to Production
- Code security vulnerability scanning using such tools available in GitHub (native code scanning) and Azure DevOps (Defender for DevOps and the various security resources available / inherent in Azure)
Hammer Dev proves that our DevOps engineering client initiatives gained quality and efficiency by quantifying fewer application / solution issues post-deployment, and by allowing better control over our client’s cloud tenant’s security and resources.
