In less than a decade, DevOps has emerged and is now critical to digital transformation and delivery of IT software and applications. In this hyper-dynamic environment, practices keep on evolving. The possibilities seem endless, but where should you begin?
Driven by the digitalisation of companies, IT services and processes have improved a lot in just a few years. It’s clear that the DevOps approach has made a major contribution to this. Yet, many still wonder how they can optimise and modernise their strategies. A 2020 study by Sonatype offers proof of this: only 15% of organisations consider their DevOps adoption is fully mature.
Yes, you’ve heard and read it before, but this is a matter of life and death for your business, or at least for your role. DevOps is not only about tools and IT. It goes much deeper than that. It’s a shift towards agility culture. It’s about how fast and how effectively you drive business change.
McKinsey has shown us that the culture is your greatest enabler, or blocker, along your path towards agile transformation. More than two out of three executives acknowledge that this is their number one challenge.
Why? Because a successful agile transformation requires a strong alignment across the organisation, starting with management. Half measures are not possible when it comes to agility. Some have tried it, but half-baked approaches don’t even offer half the benefits you could expect.
Also read: "So You Want to Be an Agile Organisation"
DevOps and cloud computing have tightened links. Both have agility at their core. Both contribute towards more flexibility, less downtime and faster delivery.
A Redgate study shows us the evidence. 43% of organisations that have adopted DevOps have already shifted to all or mostly cloud-based models. To understand this figure, you need to compare it with the proportion of businesses that haven’t adopted a DevOps approach. Only 12% have migrated to cloud or hybrid solutions.
In a nutshell, modernising your DevOps strategy provides the agility needed to start modernising your infrastructure. This helps organisations take advantage of the opportunities cloud computing provides.
Speaking of agility and modernising your architecture, adopting microservices will also help to improve your DevOps journey. The old and inflexible monolithic application model no longer fulfils today’s fast-moving and dynamic needs.
Microservice architecture arranges an application as a collection of services. This modularity allows your team to work in parallel without affecting each other’s work. It makes monitoring, maintenance and testing quick and straightforward.
On that subject, a significant trend is the increasing adoption of Kubernetes and OpenShift. This advanced solution enables businesses to deploy, operate, and scale modern containerised applications, independently of the platforms or OS.
Security has become a vital concern for IT, and the same goes for DevOps. Teams now need to grow into a DevSecOps approach. It means integrating security in the full development cycle. Injecting security into every layer as secure code helps detect and resolve vulnerabilities quickly.
One standard tool in modern DevOps is the security champion program. How does it work? One or several team members with an interest in security acts as a supervisor on a day-to-day basis. Not only do they enhance security throughout the process, but they also help to bridge the gap between developers, operators, and security teams.
Telstra, an Australian telecom company, believes that it helped them to achieve improvement in secure coding skills by almost 30%.
DevOps is and will continue to be a hot topic for many businesses. It’s a prerequisite for your digital transformation. The sooner you embark on it, the better it will be. This will get you ready for the next big wave: Artificial Intelligence. You should be preparing to integrate AI to boost your processes. With more automation, apps will be tested at a higher pace and developed with more accuracy. So, are you ready to dive deeper into DevOps?
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