DevOps is a word made by two other words: “development” and “operations.” It brings the development and operations teams together to speed up software release into production. DevOps is more than a technological concept: it is a potential advantage for all companies that apply it to develop digital products.

DevOps guarantees secure, homogeneous, fast, and automated deployment across different environments. Before, these tasks used to be manual, which resulted in many errors, delays, and more security risks. In terms of time savings – which results in lower costs – the time reduction spans from many hours to just a few seconds.

There are different sub-practices within the DevOps universe. CI/CD (continuous integration / deployment) leaves the old scheme behind. It used to take a long time between software development and live testing, which meant that errors would be carried over during that entire period. Instead, each new piece created should be designed to integrate with what is already working without involving manual processes (CI) to be deployed in quality control and production environments.

Automation as a flagship

All aggregates are automatically tested and loaded into a repository, where they will be deployed. Thus, agility is gained, efforts to get aggregates up and running are minimized, and other historical conflicts, such as the lack of supervision and communication between development and operations teams, are resolved.

Another significant benefit of DevOps is that dependencies on people are eliminated. As mentioned, one person was responsible – an administrator – who made it impossible to implement a minimal change if unavailable for some reason.

It is also helpful to perform faster debugging when the source of the problem is unknown. When people leave their cars for repair, they trust that the operation’s success is beyond their control and field of expertise. In the case of software, something similar happens. When the user discovers that something is wrong, it has already harmed the organization. The problem may be a code error. Or it may be much more than that. DevOps combines a range of expertise – analysis, code, infrastructure, etc. – that allows you to tie things up faster and accelerate time to repair.

Much more than just a code

As software products become more critical to the business, DevOps gains importance because it allows addressing numerous issues beyond the development stage, such as scalability (Does the software support growth from thousands of users to millions?), monitoring (What is the level of performance at any given moment? Were there anomalies? Were issues reported?), security, password management, integrations with third-party applications or even business metrics. The experience of a technology partner adds value. At Making Sense, for example, we work to leverage and improve each automation performed in new projects.

DevOps is also the way to ensure optimal use of the infrastructure when the cloud is consolidating as the de facto standard. It contemplates load balancing, backup and recovery operations, validation and security, databases or databases, or optimal content sharing.

A suitable and specialized manager must manage both the infrastructure and the services. It is common for a developer with superficial knowledge of how to upload something to the cloud to do it mechanically and without adhering to best practices. DevOps here marks a key differential. It offers a comprehensive view of the solution with a horizon that goes far beyond the specific needs of the moment to deliver a versatile, reusable, scalable, secure, and performing environment.

Significantly reduced costs, which are kept under control, a knowledge base and a quick resolution of errors, agility to quickly implement new solutions and anticipate a rapidly changing market, maximum performance, guaranteed quality of software products… DevOps is much more than a new acronym in the world of technology: it is a massive opportunity for your business to perform at its best.