Codrin Baleanu, Solutions Architect, Levi9
Everyone wants to increase business efficiency, right? But for that you need a decent DevOps team. But what is DevOps and how can it improve your business? How do you get started? Let’s dive in…
What is DevOps?
In simple terms, as a job, DevOps is the combination of a software developer and a traditional operations role. Why? Because to be successful in a cloud environment, you must understand both. The two go together, like bread and butter.
Having better cooperation between developers and operations streamlines complexities, giving you a full overview and control over deployments, costs, and resources from a single portal.
This enables faster turnaround and allows you to implement new ideas and products at a much lower cost and faster speed.
A Culture Of Efficiency
Implementing DevOps unleashes an entirely new way of getting feedback, which shapes the way you approach problems. Instead of waiting months for feedback, you see finished products and results in days or weeks.
A lot of this is possible because of the cloud. If your business is looking to stay relevant in the market, save money, and develop performance resilient products, a cloud-based solution is, in my experience, the ultimate choice.
It’s always nice to see companies adopting DevOps and the cloud to solve their problems. When I started with the AWS cloud, it was tough. But once I got the hang of it, I felt empowered to try and build more effectively. I now spend a lot of my time helping developers and customers understand the DevOps way of seeing things – through presentations, training, and workshops.
Putting It Into Practice
When we implement DevOps with you, getting a good understanding of your current data flows and system resources is critical from the start. To improve your current situation, we need to see what’s already built and understand how your current solution works together. If we’re building everything from scratch with you, that’s even better. First, we need to fully understand your business driver’s key metrics – where your business is at, and where you want to go. We then need to learn what a successful outcome looks like – for both your users and stakeholders – to ensure you reach your business goals.
Discovery and Beyond
Once we fully understand your data structure, business metrics, and goals, we deep-dive into the layers of your solution. We’ll ask you further questions to tailor and modify this foundational structure to present you with the tentative solution and discuss the pros and cons.
It’s a discovery phase, learning what you need to do and what we need to do to craft the solution to your business problems.
Shaping a highly effective DevOps solution takes time. Some projects of mine have lasted a few months, while others took several years. It’s all about creating a practical solution to fit the size of your company – to balance speed, complexity, and cost. A small company with smaller budgets operates very differently to larger ones.
Ultimately, software needs an objective. It needs to work in step with an organisation’s ambitions. Getting the balance right, and making sure everything fits together in the right way is where DevOps shines.