DevOps and Continuous Deployment: The Future of Software Development

Every software organization wants to ship new products and features faster than anyone else.

The question is: How quickly can you ship, and how do you enable this in your organization?

Speed doesn’t come in a day or two; it requires focus, commitment, and a willingness to adapt. That’s where DevOps comes in. Don’t confuse DevOps for just a set of tools. It’s a cultural change that touches multiple teams across the organization. Even though DevOps done right has a lot of advantages, there are some challenges to adopting DevOps. These include the following.

• Focusing on technology and tools rather than on people.

• Having faulty metrics to measure productivity.

• Lack of DevOps tools and knowledge of which tools do what.

People in the organization cannot adapt to the changes in the organization suddenly. Taking the above things in mind, you need to adapt to DevOps practice with a proper plan and strategy. Change is the root cause of almost all outages, but business requires the change to compete in this competitive world where things are moving so fast.

DevOps practice encourages Agile methodologies. Agile sets the flow on fire and makes things faster by allowing you to deploy and deliver continuously.

DevOps reduces the friction between development and operations team by making the software development process frictionless, Agile, continuous, and transparent.

We all know that Continuous Deployment and Continuous Delivery are the new buzzwords.

Continuous Deployment is a software engineering approach in which every change is proven to be deployable at any time. This should be the goal of every software-powered organization.

This sums up to one thing: practicing DevOps and Continuous Deployment properly can help you succeed as a business. Continuous Deployment is possible only when you practice DevOps.

The most powerful tool for developers is automation, so why not recognize the repetitive and mundane tasks that are consuming a lot of developers' time and automate them? This will increase the overall productivity of the organization by allowing developers to focus more time on the product and features that need to be added, which leads to faster release cycles.

This is where DevOps practices and Continuous Deployment come into the picture to make things clear and faster.

There are many wonderful tools that help you practice DevOps, including but not limited to:

• Docker

• Git (GitHub)

• AWS

• JIRA

• Ansible

• Slack

• Shippable

• New Relic

• Splunk

• Chef

Conclusion

Practicing DevOps and adopting yourself to the Continuous Deployment mode of organization is the need of the hour in order to be competitive in the software industry. This will surely boost productivity and improve your learning curve, as well as remove repetitive tasks in the organization, making your product deliverables faster to the market. This also allows for a healthy feedback loop that can help you understand your mistakes and correct them as early as possible.