How Can a Modern DevOps Approach Help You?

Traditional companies have the foundations of their IT departments in the 80s and 90s — strongly process-oriented, and often organised as dedicated teams for individual IT resources such as storage, networking, security, infrastructure, and so on. Users who need these resources request them using tickets, and those requests are processed by a team member. This ticket-based resource management suffers from many ailments. There is always a chance that the team member misunderstands the request — resulting in not delivering it at the required quality, or making a human mistake, for example a typo.

Processing more complex requirements, made up of a combination of these resources, multiplies these problems to a higher level: individual teams have different priorities, motivations, and discipline. It takes an extremely long time to complete a more complex request. The difficulty of obtaining resources for your project creates the preconditions for "grey" infrastructure — a server thrown somewhere in the office with the latest Docker installed — simply because it is "faster". At the same time, there is a need for handlers whose job is to push for tickets to be dealt with, often through a personal visit and standing over someone until the request is met. This leads to a loss of motivation: all day long people only deal with user requests, and so a kind of operation where someone constantly comes to them needing "this" and "now". It is easy to work a lot without the substance of the matter being solved systematically. As a result, it can take weeks or months to make changes or deploy new environments for new applications. That is a big difference compared to the hypothetical fintech startup from Asia that can deploy its application twice a day without disrupting the service — converging faster to the required functionality.

However, DevOps itself is only the culmination of the "agilisation" of an organisation, and the effort to run it in a traditional corporate environment is doomed to fail — because the transaction costs of obtaining an IT resource are too high.

Benefits of modern DevOps

The term DevOps is often misused merely as a trendy name for the old administration team. The DevOps concept actually arose from the need for a quick response to the rapidly changing situation in young Internet startups.

Its beginnings go back to companies such as Facebook and Google, which grew extremely fast — gaining roughly a million new users a day who wanted to use the service, which put enormous pressure on a rapid sequence of changes. Technologies and processes that worked with fewer users quickly stop working and need to be changed. Operating during such growth looks more like changing the engine and the wheels on a car at full speed on the highway — without interrupting the journey.

Among the main benefits of implementing DevOps principles, we consider:

• higher solution quality;
• automation = lower error rate;
• faster time to market;
• lower turnover of IT specialists due to stereotypical work;
• higher employee engagement.

Prerequisites

The implementation of modern DevOps requires certain prerequisites to be met:

• a quality and experienced implementation team;
• management support;
• support for end-to-end changes (technological, process, and organisational);
• involvement of other organisational units within IT in the changes.

Where We Apply This

Modern DevOps is at the core of how we help teams in regulated, high-stakes environments ship faster without sacrificing quality or control. If you want to understand the specific benefits a DevOps approach could bring in your environment, contact us for a free consultation. Explore our services or meet the team behind Grow2FIT.