The importance of DevOps as you move to the cloud

When digital presence, services, applications, and support have become crucial for a company's existence, operations also become dependent on a fast and well-functioning development process. Unfortunately, business history is also full of organizations that are held back because of slow application development or that IT has simply not been able to keep up with the requirements of the business.

An essential part of increasing the time to market and the quality of development and gaining a better overview of the entire delivery process was implementing the operational structure DevOps. It was simply that the development and operations sides would no longer function in two separate silos. By tearing down the boundaries between ordinary developers and operational roles, better continuity and a more precise division of responsibilities are created, making it easier to achieve the organizational goals. All good so far!

The core of DevOps is automation and agile methodology. The idea is to allow developers to respond to the business needs almost in real time. This enables DevOps to remove many of the delays and hurdles that would otherwise slow down software development. As a result, DevOps has led to continuous integration, distribution, and delivery.

Remove obstacles for a fully functioning DevOps

Implementing a DevOps structure, however, is not a magic wand. While the development process becomes smoother and faster, purchasing hardware and software can become a bottleneck for both developments, testing, updates, and version control. Worst case, developers must wait for deliveries of physical servers to be able to distribute and deliver new applications. Therefore, it is imperative that DevOps and the cloud work hand in hand. Here are some examples of why:

• The centralized nature of the cloud provides automation, which you can get in a DevOps structure, a standard, and a centralized platform for testing, commissioning, and production. The distributed nature of many enterprise systems in the past does not work well with centralized software distribution. Using a cloud platform solves many problems created by distributed structures.
• Most public and private cloud vendors systematically support DevOps in their platforms, including integration and development tools. The tight integration reduces the costs associated with local DevOps automation technology and provides centralized management and control for a sound DevOps process. Many developers who go into the process think that control keeps them away from problems. It is easier to control this centrally via the cloud than trying to keep track of several different departments.
• Cloud-based DevOps, where resources can be scaled up and down based on utilization, makes it easier to track costs related to development resources and adapt them to current needs. The degree of utilization is usually reported in the cloud per application, developer, user, data, and much more. Traditional systems do not usually provide this.

These are just a few examples of the importance of implementing an effective DevOps structure as you approach the cloud.

We at CGI help several companies with large and complex development projects to get a better organization and follow-up on their projects and better cost control, clearer requirements, and a smooth and complete life cycle management.
How does your development process work? Have you fully embraced DevOps? How do you connect the cloud to your DevOps structure? I am interested to hear how you do and if there is anything we can help you with.