IT Infrastructure Projects and Web Applications that improve your Business/ROI can be enhanced by using the DevOps approach. Many SMB’s face obstacles such as lack of experience within their IT infrastructure management team only needing resources for a few months to complete smaller projects.
Let’s have a look at the benefits of DevOps, Dev Ops Practices and how an outsourcing resource approach to DevOps could be an option for your SMB.
Benefits of DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices that shortens the system development life cycle and provides continuous delivery of high-quality software. Benefits include:
Speed – implementation based on tried and tested infrastructure patterns without delays due to “learning on the job”
Rapid delivery – by using Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) principles server, storage and network can be quickly deployed using scripts and templates.
Reliability – Since manual steps are eliminated from the infrastructure rollout this leads to increased consistency and hence reliable deployments.
Scaled – Since infrastructure is coded it can be re-used and deployed across several environments often with minimal change.
Collaboration – Infrastructure code can be shared amongst the DevOps team allowing for open contribution and peer review.
Security – Infrastructure code version history is captured within a repository and executions of the code are logged by DevOps user id.
DevOps Practices
Best Practices for DevOps include
Continuous Integration and Delivery – This eliminates any manual code deployments or manual configuration of environment related parameters (e.g. database endpoints and credentials).
Infrastructure as a Code – all infrastructure deployments and maintenance should be coded to completely remove any need for manual intervention.
Monitoring and Logging – Implementation of a centralized repository for Infrastructure and application logging leads to a more efficient and responsive support process.
Collaboration – This is a more natural process when infrastructure is treated as shared code rather than each DevOps person remembering a series of manual steps.
DevOps Framework(s)
Frameworks can provide a set of best practices to evaluate how well an architecture is aligned to a Cloud Service Providers best practices. For example – AWS Well-Architected Framework encompasses the following 5 areas in its Whitepaper:
- Operational Excellence
- Security
- Reliability
- Performance Efficiency
- Cost Optimization
We recommend checking your Cloud Service Providers white papers as part of your DevOps approach.
DevOps outsourcing options
Why do Companies use them? – When resources are only required for a few months or a range of skills are required (e.g. Project manager, QA Analyst, Engineers and IaC Developers) that the company does not possess or is not available due to other constraints.
How they work – Resources can be utilised for a few months and a combination of remote/on-site work performed with progress tracked by means of a time-based reporting system.
Benefits:
- Lower overall cost than bringing in a range of full-time staff.
- Resources often have more experience and can bring in their outside expertise to projects
- Resources can include a Project Manager to manage the project in its entirety.
- SLA level accountability from a team of resources for specific projects.