Businesses across all sectors are trying to deliver web applications to their customers faster than ever before, empowered by Agile development practices. However, applications are inherently complex and releasing them faster while maintaining the quality that customers demand presents a big challenge. A single release leads to several application deployments across Development, QA, Staging and Production environments. But more often than not, the last mile production deployments have a high failure rate because of the challenging disconnect between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams.

Dev and Ops teams have fundamentally different goals and incentives. Dev is paid to create change and keep the business moving forward whereas Ops is paid to keep the lights on. As most downtime happens due to change, it’s change that is feared and resisted by Ops. Many organizations are co-locating Dev and Ops teams to address the gap. Still, this isn’t enough. The cultural and technology divide between these two teams still prevent them from producing change from a customer and market centric approach. 

To solve this problem, DevOps has become an increasingly popular technique for shepherding software from the design phase through development and testing all the way into production. The business value of DevOps is quite profound: DevOps reduces software delivery times, improves application quality, and enhances the productivity and communications of the Dev and Ops teams. Most importantly, DevOps reduces the complexity, errors, and risk of application deployment failures in Production, the most important stage of the Application Delivery Pipeline. For a successful DevOps implementation, organizations must take a Dev-centric approach to address this gulf for these primary reasons: 

•    To takeadvantage of Dev's comprehensive understanding of the applications

•    To benefit from Dev's experience with the application deployment processes

•     Provide critical end-to-end visibility across the Application Delivery Pipeline for minimizing deployment and production problems

Getting DevOps right can address many of the issues development teams face during the software development and delivery process and achieve faster time to market with higher quality for their applications.

Ashish Kuthiala is head of global product marketing at Electric Cloud. Ashish brings over 20 years of experience in software development and marketing. Prior to joining Electric Cloud, Ashish served as senior director of global product marketing at AccelOps, an IT management software company. Previously, Ashish spent over a decade at Hewlett-Packard, most recently as director of global product marketing for HP Software’s Network Management Center where he developed and lead a team for two of the company’s top enterprise software portfolios – Network Automation and Network Management. Prior to this role, Ashish led the marketing function for HP's top 10 strategic high-tech accounts, generating several million dollars of new sales pipeline opportunities working with C-level executives. Ashish also served as a senior consultant for ReplayTV and software engineer at Fidelity Information Services (formerly Alltel Information Services). Ashish is an established author whose latest paper can be found in the August issue of Embedded Computing Design.

Ashish holds a master of business administration from Kellogg School Of Management and a master of science degree from the University of South Carolina.