DevOps

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the partnership of developers and IT teams within an organization to accelerate the development of technology and encourage innovation. This unified organizational model redefines the responsibilities and relationships within development teams, ultimately benefiting enterprises by encouraging collaboration, automating processes, and promoting scalability. 

How does DevOps compare to other organizational approaches?

In a DevOps model, developer and IT teams are unified under the same department and their roles are restructured as DevOps engineers. DevOps engineers must collaborate on the development, implementation, and maintenance stages of technology production. Traditional organizational approaches run development and IT operations as two separate entities. In this model, developers are responsible for creating applications, while IT is responsible for the implementation and performance monitoring process. The DevOps model has several advantages over the traditional model, including automation, collaboration, and scalability.  

Innovation is more prevalent in the DevOps model because automated tools can carry out repetitive tasks, allowing teams to focus on new developments. In the traditional model, IT is responsible for monitoring applications. Their role is to oversee application performance to ensure they are available and are functioning at efficient speeds.  

In the DevOps model, tasks are automated with tools such as application performance monitoring, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Continuous integration is a key component of DevOps automation because it tests new code to ensure it will be supported by the application and will not impact performance. Continuous delivery is another automated process that implements the new code into applications without disruption. When processes are automated, DevOps engineers can focus on developing applications, resolving inefficiencies, and value creation, instead of allocating time to manually performing repetitive functions. 

The DevOps model also facilitates collaboration, which accelerates the growth of technology. Traditional methods isolate the IT and development teams, preventing information from being exchanged. This limits development and creates inefficiencies because team members focus on their own tasks in an application, which does not require an understanding of how components interact. In the DevOps model, DevOps engineers work across interacting components and are required to communicate about the entire system. This means that they can contribute their own expertise across the organization for others to learn, promoting overall excellence.  

Scalability is another benefit of DevOps organizational models because infrastructure is comprised of code, rather than hardware. In traditional models where infrastructure is hardware, there are problems when companies experience fluctuations in demand. They risk overinvesting in infrastructure, which unnecessarily increases costs, or underinvesting in infrastructure, passing up on low hanging growth opportunities. Alternatively, DevOps environments utilize Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which allows infrastructure resources to scale to demand. This promotes efficiency and cost optimization because resources can be rightsized as they are needed. 

How can companies augment their DevOps teams, particularly in the cloud?

The structure and benefits of a DevOps model establishes a foundation for cloud environments to succeed. To maximize the success of DevOps teams in the cloud, performance and efficiency decisions must be considered in the proper context. When investment decisions are considered under the lens of value creation, DevOps teams can operate at their greatest potential. The alternative is to consider development decisions under a lens of cost cutting or cost optimization, which hinders the growth of technology development.  

When a company aims to maximize value creation and invests in performance enhancing tools, they free developers from onerous performance tuning and instead let them drive new feature development. When a company guides development decisions with cost cutting or cost optimization, they miss growth opportunities. They are limited by unrealized opportunities for performance and efficiency optimizations, leaving dollars on the table. Companies can enjoy a flywheel of profitable growth with a value-oriented DevOps team, even if that means spending more money in absolute term  

How does Azul help DevOps teams?

Azul works with DevOps teams by providing them with the tools they need to optimize the performance of the systems. Azul Platform Prime is the world’s only cloud-native JVM that optimizes Java code itself. This optimized code improves application performance, enabling DevOps teams to focus on what matters – building new features – rather than spending time tuning Java performance. These investments will translate into greater productivity, retention, and value creation.