Positive Impacts of DevOps, CI/CD, AWS/MS Azure on Digital Transformation
The success of today’s technology companies depends on their ability to quickly offer new products that are of considerable value to customers. “But we know it’s hard to deliver consistently positive results in an uncertain and continually shifting global marketplace,” says Mark Langley, president and CEO of the Project Management Institute. In a world in which customers are always demanding products or services that are not only cheaper but also better than what competitors are offering, forward-thinking businesses cannot afford to be complacent about growth. Rather than trying to maintain the status quo, brands need to constantly sense new opportunities to retain or expand their market share.
However, according to Professor of Family Business and Entrepreneurship Peter Vogel, the identification of business opportunities alone does not translate into business success. In his words, “ideas are not the same as opportunities.” Most technology startup leaders have remarkable IT ideas that can disrupt the market, but they lack the financial resources to accelerate their software development life cycle faster than competitors. While some tech companies have the financial power to finance their supposedly game-changing projects, they hardly have all the tools to automate and digitize their workflows and infrastructure on a large scale.
So, how can enterprises achieve digital perfection or achieve greater software efficiencies? The answer is simple. It is by adopting DevOps, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft (MS) Azure. With DevOps, CI/CD, AWS, and MS Azure, tech startups can quickly scale up their businesses and compete with rivals monopolizing market share.
Meaning of DevOps
DevOps has become a household name in the software development industry ever since Patrick Debois mentioned the word in 2009 in a conference held in Ghent, Belgium. Yet this term means different things to different individuals, admitted Scott Carey in his interview with Gene Kim, the former CTO of Tripwire. Some people understand DevOps as the combined use of Git, Gradle, Selenium, Jenkins, Nagios, Docker and other software tools to build, improve and automate IT operations. However, some folks regard DevOps as an advanced agile methodology in which IT projects are broken down into several iterations. Such views, though compelling, do not provide a full picture of the meaning of DevOps.
DevOps involves a series of steps, but it is not complicated as many people think. In simple terms, DevOps can be defined as a collaborative culture characterized by the use of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) practices to achieve business goals. This cultural shift places much emphasis on shortening software lifecycle by shattering the wall of confusion that slows down the productivity of the software development team and the IT operations team. This is done through the continuous integration, continuous source code management, and continuous delivery.
On the surface, DevOps seems like an idea that was conceived in one fell swoop. But the idea did not come from one project management source. Many of the concepts fundamental to a DevOps culture are derived from or inspired by the Lean model, the Toyota approach, the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, and the Agile model. Without these practices, software engineers would still be in the lurch about how to enhance their productivity without compromising the quality of