The Role of DevOps in Modern Custom Software Development

Many custom software development firms trust DevOps for developing any project. DevOps simply stands for Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops). It is an approach to fulfill all the IT operations throughout the software or system development lifecycle (SDLC). The reason why it is getting popular is its compatibility with the Agile approach.

If you follow the DevOps, you’re going to spend 60% less time in handling the support system. DevOps can easily improve the speed and quality of multiple software projects by bridging modern software development and operations teams. This cross-team collaboration has offered better results than other software development strategies. If you look over the fresh data of Statista, DevOps/DevSecOps is the most used development methodology (47%), followed by Agile/Scrum (37%), Kanban (26%), and Waterfall (28%).

Why DevOps Is Important?

Let’s understand the concept with an example. Suppose there’s an e-commerce company that has separate development and operations teams. The software app development company is responsible for developing the company’s website and mobile app, while the operations team is completely responsible for deploying and maintaining the product and production.

And it is happening over the years in each industry. This historical separation led to a lack of interaction between the two teams, and it could lead to harmful consequences such as:

• Frequent production incidents due to miscommunication and lack of visibility.
• Delays in deploying critical updates and bug fixes due to resistance from the operations team.
• A culture of blame where development and operations teams point fingers at each other when issues occur.
• A lack of alignment between the fast-paced development cycle and the need for a stable and reliable production environment.

In such a case, DevOps could be the best solution. 

How are DevOps Helping Organizations to Gain Profit?

DevOps has truly revolutionized software development in the current market. There are many benefits of DevOps you can address, such as:

• Faster and more frequent software releases
• Automated testing and deployment of code changes
• Identify and eliminate defects early 
• Higher software quality and more reliable applications
• Collaboration between development, operations, and other stakeholders (Shared responsibilities)
• Minimum human errors 
• Integrated security 
• Easy scaling of infrastructure and applications 
• Ongoing improvement with continuous feedback
• Compatibility with Agile methodologies 
• Avoids unnecessary expenses and saves money

Now, let’s take a deep look at the key factors and principles of DevOps that play a key role in custom software development firms.

Collaboration

As we discussed before, the complete separation of the operation and development teams can easily create frequent delays and breakdowns. Not only this but there will always be issues related to transparency and 

DevOps ensures that the software being developed is not only functional or feature-rich but also reliable, scalable, and easily maintainable.

Automation with Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)

DevOps promotes the practice of continuous integration and continuous delivery. After launching a software product, it is important to make frequent updates and improvements according to the increasing competition and customer demands. 

In such cases, small code changes are frequently integrated into a shared repository. To resolve any issues, many automated tests are run to detect issues as soon as possible. This helps in identifying and fixing problems before they reach production.

Following the automated content integration, we further proceed with the deployment process. In a DevOps-enabled CD pipeline, the deployment process is automated. Once the code passes all automated tests, it can be automatically deployed without manual intervention to a staging or production environment. Continuous delivery enables software to be deployed to production at any time.  

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

DevOps believes in treating infrastructure as code. In simple words, we can manage and define the whole infrastructure (servers, networks, databases, etc.) using code. Let’s understand this with an example. 

Suppose a cloud-based startup wants to adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices. In this scenario, the startup uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their cloud service provider and AWS CloudFormation to implement IaC. Here’s how IaC is applied in this case:

The startup’s infrastructure needs include a web application hosted on Amazon EC2 instances, an RDS database, and an S3 bucket for storing user uploads. Instead of manually creating these resources through the AWS Management Console, they define their entire infrastructure in a CloudFormation template, which is essentially a JSON or YAML file.

The CloudFormation template is stored in a version control system, such as Git. So, they tracked, reviewed, and collaborated with the development and operations teams.

As the startup grows, it can easily scale by adjusting the CloudFormation template. For example, they can add more EC2 instances to handle increased web traffic or increase the size of the RDS database. 

The CloudFormation template is integrated into the CI/CD pipeline. Whenever code changes are made to the web application, the pipeline automatically updates the CloudFormation stack. 

In case of issues or failures, the startup can roll back to a previous, known-good state by simply applying a previous version of the CloudFormation template. 

Monitoring and Feedback

DevOps focuses on the real-time monitoring of applications and infrastructure in production. This provides valuable feedback to development teams and helps in identifying issues that need to be addressed promptly.

Security (DevSecOps), Scalability and Resilience

DevOps practices help ensure that software is designed to be scalable and resilient, capable of handling increasing loads and recovering from failures gracefully. Maven, Selenium, Git, Terraform, Kubernetes, Ansible, Docker, Jenkins, and Nagios are some popular tools used by custom software development companies to enhance their project. In addition to these, platforms like Axify help teams monitor engineering metrics and optimize development processes.

Security is an integral part of modern software development, and DevOps extends to include security practices as well (DevSecOps). Security checks and measures are integrated into the development pipeline to ensure that software is developed and deployed securely.

Bottom Line

Many prestigious custom software development companies are using seamless integration of DevOps. Intetics is also known for the best IT solutions for all B2B, B2C, and B2B2C interactions; if you’re curious to know more about DevOps and how it actually works in real, visit intetics.com. 

I hope you enjoyed reading here! Have a nice day!