Adopting and Fostering a DevOps Culture
September 17, 2019

Ajay Kaul
AgreeYa Solutions

While DevOps has been around for a decade and has proven effective in delivering applications faster and more reliably while saving money, many organizations have not embraced or implemented DevOps methods. In order to effectively implement DevOps throughout an organization, changes are required in its technology culture — beginning at the top.

Some organizations still use a manual-build process, don't create unit tests and only utilize manual QA testing or manual deployments. They must change their way of thinking, and spend the time to automate these tasks, if they are to implement DevOps methods effectively. For many people in technology, the benefits of automating these tasks are self-evident.

So, why are some organizations still performing many or all of these steps manually?

For these organizations, making the change requires a significant paradigm shift. The developers, QA and IT operations staff are used to doing things a certain way. Many are under so much pressure to deliver on time, they don't have a moment to consider, understand or implement a different approach. The misconception is that implementing technology or project management tools to automate these processes will take more time and cost more money.

Initially, it will take some time, and incur an additional financial cost, to learn and implement DevOps methods. However, in the long term, time expenditures and costs will be reduced. For example, once an automated build process has been created for an application, the effort to manually build the application is eliminated for all future builds.

Starting with CI/CD

DevOps is about more than just implementing a continuous integration and deployment ("CI/CD") process. However, if an organization does not have a DevOps practice, this is a good place to start.

Using a continuous integration tool, each build is run automatically to check its code against the version control. By adding continuous deployment, a web application may be automatically deployed to a web server, mobile application, distribution server or app store. Automating these processes also eliminates reliance on the availability of certain individuals, who may be the only ones that know how to manually perform the build or deployment.

Another benefit from an automated build process is that every step of the build is performed consistently each time it is run, ensuring that steps are not missed. This may include creating a deployable artifact, code linting, running the unit tests and running integrations tests. Deploying these tests consistently automatically improves the quality and reliability of the application. Bugs are detected earlier in the development process, which reduces the overall effort and cost to fix them.

By reducing the time and effort it takes to build and deploy an application, costs are reduced, and applications can be delivered more quickly, with higher quality. This reduction to ongoing costs offsets the initial investment to create the CI/CD process.

Organizations that are developing applications for themselves, over a longer timeframe, may be more willing to consider a change to using DevOps methods. Organizations developing applications for other businesses may not believe they will experience similar benefits — particularly, if it's for smaller projects that only take a few months to complete. However, even these organizations can benefit from using DevOps methods for short-term projects. Once the CI/CD systems have been set up, and processes have been created for a project type (NET, iOS, Android, etc.), a template for each project type can be created and used in similar, future projects.

Changing to a DevOps culture starts by helping management understand the benefits of a DevOps practice. It is not technology for technology's sake, but rather brings value to the business — reducing cost and time, while delivering an application and improving overall quality.

Ajay Kaul is a Managing Partner of AgreeYa Solutions
Share this

Industry News

September 21, 2023

Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.

September 21, 2023

Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.

September 20, 2023

Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

September 20, 2023

Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.

September 20, 2023

DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.

September 19, 2023

Oracle announced the availability of Java 21.

September 19, 2023

Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.

September 19, 2023

Buildkite announced the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Packagecloud, a cloud-based software package management platform, in an all stock deal.

September 19, 2023

CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire Bionic, a provider of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).

September 18, 2023

Perforce Software announces BlazeMeter's Test Data Pro, the latest addition to its continuous testing platform.

September 18, 2023

CloudBees announced a new cloud native DevSecOps platform that places platform engineers and developer experience front and center.

September 18, 2023

Akuity announced a new open source tool, Kargo, to implement change promotions across many application life cycle stages using GitOps principles.

September 14, 2023

CloudBees announced significant performance and scalability breakthroughs for Jenkins® with new updates to its CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) software.