Why Adopt DevOps? Learnings From 5-Week Bootcamp
A Cultural Transformation Through Technology!
In the following blog post, Version 1 Associates Jignesh and Sumit who joined through our recent graduate intake give their view on our intensive 5-week DevOps training programme. The aim of this intensive programme was to prepare our new Version 1 Associates to deliver Digital and Cloud services to our customers.
According to Wikipedia, DevOps combines software development (Dev) with Information technology operations (Ops) to shorten the systems development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives. However, according to our understanding, DevOps isn’t about a new technology or a product but a culture of software development that seeks stability and performance at the same time as automating everything possible to speed up software deliveries.
Why Adopt DevOps?
Using the traditional way of delivering software can take weeks, sometimes even months to bring the software to production. Even after the software is in production, it sometimes becomes very difficult for a developer to do the bug fixes in the existing product and develop new features. Even for the infrastructure team, it becomes quite difficult to test the product and put the fixed code in production and this process eventually ends up taking weeks to deliver the bug-free product.
The longer it takes to deploy updates, the longer your customers have to wait. This happens because of a lack of collaboration between Development and Operations teams, putting pressure and separate responsibilities on these individual teams.
But what if the Development team and the Operations team could work together, sharing thoughts, feedback and responsibilities rather than working towards individual and separate responsibilities? This would break down the silos, increasing collaboration between the teams and increasing the speed of delivery.
DevOps and Automation
In DevOps culture, Dev and Ops teams try to integrate everything from testing of new code to automating infrastructure and deployment. In the traditional way, large chunks of software are written over weeks or months which then take weeks of testing before the software is finally able to be put into production. In DevOps, code is written in much smaller chunks that are integrated, tested, monitored and deployed in hours. We should be aiming to automate everything! Code Testing, workflows, infrastructure…everything possible!
The benefits of DevOps:
- Increased rate of software delivery which improves time to market from weeks and months to hours and days
- Helps the company to focus more on the improvement as the infrastructure is automated
- Helps Dev and Ops teams work collaboratively and more efficiently with shared responsibilities
- Adopting DevOps also gives a competitive advantage, helping companies to innovate and react faster
Where to Start Your DevOps Transformation?
- Improve education, communication and build collaborative teams
- Evaluate new processes to support DevOps
- Re-evaluate and rebuild your service delivery cycle
- Evaluate new tech to support DevOps
- Try it in a small part of the organisation, such as one new project
Our Accelerate Experience
We would like to thank Version 1 for giving us the opportunity to go through the Accelerate programme and to develop our skills in DevOps. Amazing training was provided to us in collaboration with Technology Ireland Software Skillnets. The hands-on learning experience with DevOps tools has given us a great overall idea of how the entire process can be automated, from building code and testing, to deployment. As we know, DevOps is not just a tool but a culture that needs to be adopted with a plethora of technologies dealing with everything that can be automated.
We are really enjoying our time here at Version 1’s graduate programme and have never felt like we are limited to being ‘just’ graduates. We received a very warm welcome from everyone and feel very fortunate to start our career at a company that truly values their employees.
