DevOps outsourcing processes are becoming increasingly popular because they allow companies to make the most of specialized expertise and achieve agile software delivery. Outsourcing DevOps can benefit you from a focused approach to shortening and optimizing the software development lifecycle. The main goal here is to maximize predictability, efficiency, security, and sustainability in operational processes, all without the hassle of in-house management.
Outsourced DevOps teams bring a wealth of experience and innovation. This can lead to significant cultural shifts within your organization, like enhancing unity and trust between systems administrators and developers and aligning technology initiatives with business needs. Beyond streamlining software delivery chains, outsourced DevOps can positively impact services, employee roles, IT tools, and best practices.
Keep reading to learn how outsourcing DevOps can transform your business. We’ll share a comprehensive guide on effectively integrating outsourced DevOps teams and methodologies into your organization.
What is DevOps, and Why Does It Matter?
DevOps, short for development and operations, bridges the gap between three traditionally siloed departments: development (dev), quality assurance (QA), and operations (ops). The goal is to deliver high-quality software faster by simplifying the entire systems development lifecycle.
Continuous engineering is key in a DevOps environment. This includes creating builds, running tests, deploying software, and constantly monitoring performance with automated feedback loops.
DevOps outsourcing can bring even more value by leveraging the specialized expertise of external teams. Outsourced DevOps teams can help create a seamless environment where you can efficiently manage builds, tests, and deployments, all while receiving continuous feedback to improve performance.
The DevOps market is rapidly growing, with many businesses across various industries adopting this methodology. Gartner predicts that over 85% of companies will implement a cloud computing strategy, highlighting a significant trend within DevOps.
Despite its popularity, successfully implementing DevOps takes effort. A recent study by Puppet shows that many companies are stuck in the middle stages of DevOps evolution, categorized as low-mid, true-mid, and high-mid levels.
Main DevOps Practices and Principles
DevOps stands out from many other software methodologies because it has no strict set of practices. If you’re wondering what DevOps really means in software development, Gene Kim, a researcher and CTO, offers a clear explanation in his book, The Phoenix Project. Drawing from his own experience, Kim outlines the DevOps approach through three core principles known as the Three Ways:
- Developing flow and systems thinking
- Amplifying feedback loops
- Cultivating a culture of continuous learning
Let’s explore these principles further and see how you can apply them in DevOps outsourcing.
1. The Principle of Flow (Developing Systems Thinking)
The flow principle focuses on optimizing all working practices within a DevOps team to accelerate the transition from development (meeting market or product needs) to operations (achieving functional results). This can be achieved in several ways:
Making Smaller Batches
A batch is a work that moves through development, testing, and deployment stages. When batches take weeks to complete, it’s easy for engineers to miss bugs that could jeopardize an entire project. By keeping batches smaller, developers can identify and fix issues early. Therefore, the best practice is to keep batches as small as possible.
Taking on Fewer Tasks and Eliminating Waste
This straightforward yet challenging practice involves ensuring engineers and managers complete most of their current tasks before starting new ones. Avoiding multitasking leads to higher quality work, fewer technical debts, and reduced employee stress from high workloads and multiple deadlines.
To tackle your long list of unfinished tasks, reduce waste, such as unnecessary features, redundant documentation, manual work, and excessive meetings. Cancel unnecessary tasks and aim to automate others, keeping your task list streamlined.
Ensuring Visibility and Transparency
Visibility and transparency are crucial for effective collaboration. Using tools like Kanban boards can help achieve this. In Kanban, tasks are represented as cards that can be assigned and reassigned to different teams.
This approach allows every team member to see others’ current processes, facilitating better coordination. Transparent task management also smooths handoffs, as employees can track all processes and connections.
Automating Processes
Automation is a cornerstone of DevOps, enabling faster task completion with fewer errors. DevOps practices use automation to test, deploy, and optimize workflows wherever possible.
2. The Principle of Feedback (Amplifying Feedback Loops)
The core purpose of DevOps is to ensure continuous development and improvement, ultimately leading to the release of high-quality products. Continuous feedback is crucial for achieving this goal.
The principle of feedback emphasizes that a DevOps team should consistently evaluate development outcomes, identify and address issues promptly. Continuous feedback forms a loop that cycles work from operation back to development, enhancing results with each new DevOps iteration. This feedback loop relies on three essential practices:
Addressing Minor Issues Promptly
Tackling the smallest problems immediately prevents them from escalating into major issues.
Minimizing Quality Control Issues
This involves maintaining thorough and organized documentation, submitting small work increments for review, and automating testing processes.
Learning from Mistakes
Analyzing and understanding mistakes helps prevent their recurrence.
By adhering to these practices, a DevOps team can achieve higher-quality results and significantly reduce the risk of project failure.
3. The Principle of Continuous Learning (Developing a Learning Culture)
The third essential DevOps principle is continuous learning to enhance the DevOps team and foster a positive working environment. This focus on learning should permeate all company levels, not just the executive level. Similar to the feedback principle, continuous learning is built on three main practices:
Encouraging and Supporting Initiatives
A company should support its initiatives rather than blaming employees for identifying flaws, mistakes, or improvement opportunities. This can involve brainstorming potential solutions and distributing responsibilities across the team. Managers can also use automated reporting to reduce the workload.
Keeping Processes Relevant, Effective, and Up-to-Date
Continuous learning entails regularly analyzing practices and procedures to learn from experience. Managers should frequently review internal processes to ensure they remain efficient, avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy, ineffective communication, mundane tasks that need automation, and outdated methods.
Preparing for Failure
Understanding potential failures and being prepared for them are crucial aspects of DevOps. This involves creating action plans and simulating issues such as data loss or cyber-attacks to learn how to respond effectively.
Tools can greatly assist in this area. For instance, some platforms allow developers to simulate various conditions—such as different memory sizes, core counts, and processor speeds—and test how software performs under diverse circumstances. These tools enable teams to improve software through testing, simulate failures, and devise solutions quickly.
The Underlying Values of DevOps Outsourcing
As you can see, the three DevOps principles overlap in many ways to form the DevOps lifecycle. These overlaps highlight why you should use DevOps in the first place. In short, DevOps is built on:
Agility
Small batches, rapid releases, and the CI/CD approach help you become more agile and responsive to changing needs and requirements. This way, a DevOps team can create high-quality bespoke software without delays.
Collaboration
When development and operations teams collaborate effectively, you get the key DevOps benefits for a business, such as faster work, fewer mistakes, and innovative ideas.
Automation
Automating mundane tasks helps speed up product releases, as developers can focus on problem-solving instead of wasting time on manual work.
Continuous Learning
Encouraging learning and finding flaws and their solutions contributes to constantly improving developers’ skills, company processes, and final products.
A Focus on End-User Needs
A DevOps team analyzes and defines end-user needs but does not just blindly follow these ideas. Instead, when talking to the customer, the team selects the best solutions and features that meet end-user needs and bring profit to the business.
When combined, these principles and practices create benefits that explain why DevOps outsourcing is important for both software development and a business as a whole.
What Are DevOps Benefits for Business?
DevOps focuses on process management, but its benefits extend beyond team managers to the entire organization. Here are some key business-wide advantages of adopting DevOps outsourcing:
Improved Quality and Shorter Incident Recovery Time
The CI/CD approach provides developers ample feedback to address bugs early in development. Additionally, because DevOps outsourcing encourages working in small batches, these bugs are typically minor and easier to fix than major bugs found later in the project.
The impact is substantial: mature DevOps adopters report higher-quality deliverables (66%), a lower failure rate of new releases (45%), and fewer incidents (40%).
Improved Productivity and Faster Releases
Atlassian’s DevOps Trends survey reveals that organizations practising DevOps experience a 49% faster time-to-market than their pre-DevOps performance. This is not surprising. With effective DevOps practices, major errors requiring project rebuilds are unlikely, reducing delays in the final stages. Additionally, engineers continuously review and refine each product element, spending less time on these tasks at the final release. Automation further reduces development time by eliminating manual and redundant work.
Faster Response to Customer Needs
Continuous feedback, a core DevOps principle coupled with CI/CD, enables developers to adapt quickly to customer requirements. With 34% of organizations reporting weekly changes in project priorities, flexibility is essential for delivering excellent customer experiences.
Happier Employees
DevOps fosters a culture of continuous learning, employee initiative, and automation, creating a positive work environment with fewer mundane tasks and more opportunities for professional development. According to Atlassian’s survey, 48% of developers reported receiving a raise thanks to DevOps. For business owners and CEOs, this means happier employees, lower turnover rates, and reduced onboarding costs.
Better Chances to Innovate
A positive working environment encourages employees to learn and innovate. Atlassian found that 78% of developers who switched to DevOps had to learn a new skill. This new knowledge helps team members generate ideas for improving internal processes and adding innovative product features.
Lower Development Costs
Fewer mistakes, higher productivity, and higher-quality deliverables mean that teams spend less time reworking and fixing errors, reducing the overall cost of software development.
By now, you should clearly understand the DevOps model, how it works, and its main benefits when it comes to DevOps outsourcing.
Let’s move on to the next important question: What is the role of a DevOps engineer?
What is a DevOps Engineer? Role and Responsibilities
What exactly does a DevOps engineer do? Essentially, a DevOps engineer is an IT specialist who collaborates with developers and the operations team to build software following DevOps principles and practices.
A DevOps engineer acts as a bridge, connecting development and operations teams to ensure projects progress smoothly through all phases of the DevOps lifecycle. This role requires a broad skill set, including development and operations experience, management expertise, and leadership abilities.
The responsibilities of a DevOps engineer vary across organizations but typically include the following core tasks:
- Creating and updating documentation for server-side features
- Analyzing current systems to improve and enhance them using DevOps methods and principles
- Managing infrastructure
- Monitoring the success of DevOps implementation within the team, assessing its performance, and finding
- solutions for improvement
- Promoting and encouraging DevOps principles within the organization
- Managing and deploying cloud services
In summary, DevOps engineers manage the DevOps team and help instil this culture within the company, enabling the organization to reap the full benefits of DevOps outsourcing.
When Do You Need to Use DevOps Outsourcing?
Given the advantages of DevOps, such as faster and higher-quality development at lower costs, it’s clear that many organizations can benefit. However, certain types of projects are particularly well-suited for DevOps outsourcing. Here are three examples:
- Large, Multi-Stage Projects: These projects cannot tolerate significant bugs and errors. One of DevOps’ key goals is to reduce and accelerate bug fixes, making it ideal for such projects.
- Software Projects Requiring Frequent Updates: DevOps enhances development agility and shortens release times, making it perfect for projects requiring regular updates.
- Projects with Frequently Shifting Requirements: DevOps’ adaptability makes it suitable for projects where requirements often change.
Adopting DevOps practices makes perfect sense in these scenarios, especially if you choose the right DevOps outsourcing partner and pricing model for your needs.
Conclusion: Make the most of DevOps Outsourcing
The DevOps model for business intelligence allows developers to develop software quickly and efficiently. It also increases profits, improves the customer experience, and reduces errors in software development. Therefore, it is unsurprising that many businesses are actively adopting this methodology.
It takes some effort to implement DevOps outsourcing in your business. To do this, you must adhere to advanced principles and standards. Among the steps you need to take in the implementation of DevOps are creating a DevOps unit, applying a CI/CD approach, and automating testing processes.
Also, hiring a DataOps engineer may be a good way to improve your data operations and get more value from your data. While DevOps is a great all-around approach to software development and delivery, DataOps is specifically designed to meet the needs of businesses that rely heavily on data.
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