A well-established NBFC that offers loans to SMEs needed to maintain good client relations and contact. The business was creating an internal Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application to accomplish this, and they were manually deploying it in their environment. As a result, the development process was far more prone to human error and had worse efficiency. The DevOps services provided by Skillmine ensured a fully automated CI/CD solution, eliminating all potential for human error and accelerating the entire development cycle. The time to market for the CRM application was shortened by 40% due to automation in the development cycle, and the company saw a 30% ROI.
Before we examine how to apply DevOps to achieve similar benefits, let’s understand the need to implement DevOps in your company.
Why should you implement DevOps?
1. Shortening release cycles impede the company’s ability to respond swiftly to market and industry changes.
2. Encourages teams to share responsibility for the whole software development process.
3. Supports changes within management teams and asset class.
4. Expands the usage of automation.
5. Enhances coordination and strategic thinking between the management and development teams.
Steps to implement DevOps in your business
Organize a DevOps initiative
The company CIO organizes a DevOps initiative as a part of the IT department program. The IT department can make changes in the development and operations activities. The CIO optimally arranges the financial investments and human resources required by the company. Following this, a DevOps strategy is designed and monitored for implementation by the program manager.
Build a DevOps strategy
A programme manager should use best practices to enhance departmental collaboration to establish an efficient DevOps approach. Setting a single objective for everyone involved in software development and operations is crucial to speed up the development cycle and guarantee high-quality software. To shorten the software development-testing-releasing cycle, automate the key processes. These include software building, unit testing, application testing via the user interface, software integrating, deploying, and releasing.
Containerization
Containers include all the dependencies, libraries, and configuration files needed to run a programme. Regardless of the variations in the environments they are placed in, they can run reliably, even though they are separated from the entire IT infrastructure. Additionally, because the application’s components (database, front end, etc) are split up into different containers, an operations team can manage the application more quickly. This is because they don’t have to rebuild the entire programme if one of its microservices needs to be changed.
Integrate infrastructure automation with CI/CD tools
The containerized application is appropriately handled after being placed into a container. CI/CD systems like Jenkins, Bamboo, or GoCD are connected with infrastructure automation tools like Kubernetes, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet for more effective configuration management and software deployment.
Increase the amount of test automation and align QA with the development
DevOps requires appropriate automated testing to achieve faster delivery. Not all testing types, nevertheless, need to be automated. For instance, manual testing should still be used for exploratory, usability, and security testing. Functional testing may only be partially automated, depending on the writing effort required.
To prevent bugs after a release, development and testing are done simultaneously. The recommended approach is to run automated tests 1-2 times daily while the application is still being developed. Before releasing the next release, developers should fix bugs and work towards stabilising the product.
Ensure total application performance monitoring
The DevOps-related teams have visibility into all performance concerns, such as poor response times, memory leaks, and runtime errors, thanks to application performance monitoring. The problems could be discovered during application server monitoring, user experience monitoring, etc.
Application performance monitoring, which uses specialised application monitoring software, such as Zabbix, Nagios, or Prometheus, tailored for monitoring a specific application, enables detecting, prioritising, and isolating application flaws before end users discover them.
Conclusion
Delivering software more quickly without sacrificing quality is the most tangible advantage of DevOps. To realise this benefit, businesses must revamp both the IT infrastructure setup and the software development process. An organization’s IT infrastructure will become more dependable and flexible due to implementing DevOps practices like CI/CD, IaC, testing automation, comprehensive application monitoring, and others. Skillmine’s DevOps services enable businesses to align their development, testing, and production environments easily.
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