With DevOps taking center stage in the IT landscape today, it is essential for IT professionals to understand the pros and cons before adopting it. The foremost thing for enterprises is to study the core of DevOps environment is transitioning from a traditional software development model to something that can keep pace with today’s changing needs. At the same time, it involves using the right tools to streamline the automation process for smooth workflow. DevOps has become a new way of delivering IT systems that promises faster delivery and a higher quality. By implementing DevOps businesses can remove the barrier between development and operational teams, reducing application backlogs and accelerates software delivery. Organizations need to evaluate the merits and demerits of DevOps for maximizing its benefits.

DevOps can be defined as the culture and the people and not a tool, environment or a technology. Therefore, it requires a cultural change among the staff, which means discarding embedded explicit and implicit practices. Most organizations adopt a philosophy based on enhanced communication between developers and operations teams. This in turn enables speedy release. In case, if enterprises need to avoid any software vulnerabilities, businesses can create an agile process, which helps in compressing product design, development and test cycle resulting in more releases in a short interval of time.

Compiling the major elements of DevOps culture including agile, continuous integration and delivery, source code versioning, infrastructure as code, unified views can be a difficult task for enterprises. Therefore, enterprises should start with a project that is relevant and comprehensible to all teams. Businesses also should adopt agile principle of assembling a cross business, cross functional team with professionals from operations, application development and infrastructure architecture. On successful completion of this method, professionals can incorporate DevOps throughout the organization.

The next thing enterprises need to do is break down the silos in IT through organizing various business systems. All professionals should be aware of their roles with complete accountability and should work together as a team for whatever application they are responsible. Organizations must try to limit the number of applications given to a single team so that their efficiency increases. The most important benefit that DevOps has in store to offer is automation. As enterprises assemble a tool chain, each component tool must support automation to ensure repeatability and consistency.

DevOps aims at project management rather than any software language or platforms. As DevOps projects scale out, organizations can adopt many tools. Today there are myriad of tools in the market that can improve the organization’s DevOps approach. These comprise of Git and GitHub that provide code repositories, Jenkins that can manage testing codes, Perforce Software that can provide revision control system for software development. Other tools also include configuration management platforms such as Puppet and Chef. Depending on the goals and objectives of an organization, professionals can opt for the best tools. DevOps developers can also use private or public cloud to sustain more complex environments due to the scalable and flexible nature of the cloud. Public cloud is usually preferable because it offers high scalability and self-service without exhausting local IT resources. Once the testing is complete, the public cloud resources can be released to save money until the next testing cycle starts.

These benefits extend both to cloud businesses as well as traditional enterprise data centers. In some IT organizations, the DevOps movement integrates development and operations into one team. In others, a moderator between development and operations teams will manage the interaction between the groups. And in the rest, the DevOps overhaul takes on a life of its own.

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