Keep the honeymoon going with the right DevOps environment

By marrying a company’s software development processes and IT operations, DevOps breaks down organizational silos, improves business performance and lowers costs. When done right, the DevOps honeymoon never ends.
But chemistry only happens when an enterprise shapes the goals of its DevOps environment around the proper IT infrastructure. Here are a few considerations to keep in mind as your organization meshes development and operations to become more agile and responsive to the changing demands of customers.
“Shift left” with development and testing
If inefficiencies and department isolation cause a consistent backlog in software development, your products will never get off the ground. Development and testing teams should work more quickly and efficiently together, since they’ll be required to create and test applications in just a few days and often in a matter of hours or minutes.
Speed and efficiency will happen naturally as testing and development remove wasteful coding and testing processes. That comes with a “shift left,” the process that moves testing to an earlier stage of the software development cycle. By combining service virtualization with test automation, teams can test sooner in the process. That gives them ample time to offer feedback to the development team, which means issues can be resolved sooner, when they’re less costly to fix.
Automation supports continuous delivery
Automation lays the groundwork for continuous testing, a process that ensures software can be developed to high standards while getting the job done quicker and for less money than ever before. By continuously testing, your organization can follow a standard of continuous delivery, helping you validate the quality of software even after it goes out the door.
Continuous delivery connects development and testing with users so feedback can be rapidly implemented to improve the product. Repetition and exactness allow every version of software to be released with confidence and speed.
Application management runs the DevOps engine
Automated tools let you shift left and continuously test and deliver, but it’s also critical for all of your DevOps applications to be aligned. Applications constantly change for the better, so syncing them with every step of development and delivery gives developers and IT the insight they need to see what they’re working with.
With the support of application management tools, teams can detect, isolate, diagnose and solve any problems that come down the line. With the clarity to measure application availability and performance, your continuous processes will always be ready for the demands of DevOps.
PaaS packs the right punch for cloud DevOps
While cloud technology isn’t an absolute requirement of DevOps, it does offer the necessary provisioning resources that developers and testers need to quickly create the test environments for software development.
The type of service level — not whether it’s a public or private cloud — is what powers a DevOps environment. The higher the service level, the more responsive, agile and reliable your pipeline will be. A platform-as-a-service (PaaS) deployment is an ideal model because it offers application management tools and supports DevOps technologies such as containers. PaaS also consistently helps development teams create and migrate applications to the cloud more quickly and easily.
Make sure your commitment to DevOps starts on the right foot. Learn how to make the method work by registering for “DevOps for Dummies”, which can help you discover how you can fulfill your DevOps needs around the cloud.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud