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Why is DevOps a Good Investment for your Enterprise?

The DevOps trend has really started to take shape in the last few years. It’s a movement of IT leaders who want to see things change for the better—to provide amazing software to their clients consistently and with confidence. The global DevOps market size was valued at $ 6.78 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $57.90 billion by 2030, registering a CAGR of 24.2% from 2021 to 2030.

As compared to conventional methods, enterprise DevOps brings development and operations together, enhancing the efficiency, timeliness, and safety of software development and execution. A more agile SDLC (software development lifecycle) gives enterprises a competitive advantage. 

Agile software development, IT service management frameworks, project management guidelines such as Lean and Six Sigma, and other methodologies can all coexist with DevOps. All the teams can respond to customer feedback and requests in a better manner, and maximize productivity by adopting the DevOps development process and using DevOps principles and technologies and implementing the DevOps lifecycle

Moving further, let’s understand DevOps in detail and why it is a good investment for businesses in today’s technology-driven world.

What is DevOps?

Patrick Debois, one of the IT industry’s gurus, created the term “DevOps” in 2009. DevOps is a word that combines the terms “development” and “operations” to denote a collaborative or shared approach to a company’s software development and IT operations teams’ activities. A DevOps deployment methodology stems from an Agile approach to software development. It builds on the cross-functional approach to building and deploying applications in a shorter and more iterative manner.

In simple terms, DevOps is a software engineering approach that tries to connect the work of software development and software operations teams by fostering a culture of collaboration and shared accountability.

DevOps is a combination of concepts, techniques, and tools that assist an organization to create better products faster by allowing the development and operations groups to work together more effectively.

Evolution of DevOps

In 2007, Patrick Debois, a project manager with the Belgian government, was assisting with data center transfers. The barrier between the developers and the operations team made the entire process exceedingly difficult for him by making the delivery considerably slower.

Debois was a firm believer in the agile methodology, which encourages continuous testing throughout the development lifecycle, allowing developers to deliver better products more quickly. Similar concepts, he argued, should apply to development and operations departments operating in tandem. 

The following are the two key precursors of DevOps:

Enterprise systems management (ESM)

Many of the folks that helped define DevOps, in the beginning, were system administrators. System monitoring, configuration management, automated provisioning, and the toolchain approach were all brought to DevOps by these operation specialists.

Agile development

DevOps can be regarded as an offshoot of agile software development that prescribes strong collaboration of consumers, product management, developers, and (occasionally) QA to fill in the gaps and quickly iterate towards a better product. 

DevOps also recognizes that delivery of services and how the application and systems communicate are critical components of the client’s value proposition and that those concerns must be addressed as a top-level item by the product team. From this perspective, DevOps is essentially stretching Agile methodology beyond the confines of code to the fully-delivered service.

How does DevOps Work?

In older contexts, development and operations usually work in different teams within a company. The development team would write the code, while the operations team would put it in place and manage the IT infrastructure. 

When a problem arises, they begin to blame each other rather than find a solution. This disconnect between these two divisions is extremely harmful and causes a slew of issues for software development firms. 

The DevOps methodology helps improve the situation and smooth out the software development process. DevOps consulting company in the enterprise also attempts to solve almost all existing difficulties and tear down the barriers between development and operations. This method allows the entire team to quickly develop T-shaped competencies and more actively adapt to market developments.

Traditional SDLC Challenges

The traditional SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) approach has various significant flaws that must be addressed in order to improve software development efficiency. 

That is why DevOps is important to be adopted by enterprises. All of the major challenges and issues listed below have been eliminated with DevOps, resulting in increased productivity and faster software delivery.

Benefits of DevOps for Enterprises

The Google Cloud Platform DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) study for 2021 clearly highlights that successful implementation or delay in implementing top DevOps techniques is the primary difference between high-performing and poor-performing software teams. Mentioned below are the major advantages of DevOps for business growth.

Enhanced Speed: Shorter Development Cycle

One of the DevOps benefits for business is enhanced speed. Due to a biased reaction from the development and operations teams, it becomes difficult to comprehend an application’s usefulness. The production and development cycles are overly prolonged, causing the process to be delayed. 

Faster Innovation

DevOps enables you to quickly produce software solutions. Faster product delivery frees up part of your developers’ time, allowing them to experiment with new features or enhance the functioning of the ones they already have. Developers can test the feasibility of these concepts by doing a proof of concept and continuing based on the findings with minimal disturbance to the ongoing project.

Automation

With enterprise DevOps, a faster deployment process, backed by automation, can save a lot of time with quicker, smaller deployments that occur more frequently. (Time that can be better spent solving other business issues or promoting innovation.)

Minimum Production Costs

The DevOps methodology is built on automating all development lifecycle operations. DevOps principles like Continuous Integration (CI), Infrastructure as a Code (IaC), and Continuous Delivery (CD) tools focus on ensuring task scenario uniformity and infrastructure integrity. It results in 100% automation reliability and a substantial decrease in the amount of time and effort spent on repetitive and routine work.

Faster ROI (Return on Investment)

Businesses can recover their IT investments and start generating pure cash by releasing new updates faster and fixing bugs quickly. According to the 2020 industry research, DevOps collaboration saves 22% of the time on rework and unscheduled tasks.

Conclusion

The technological and financial benefits of DevOps are enormous, as may be deduced from this information. To recap, a well-thought-out DevOps strategy and implementation can significantly improve the efficiency of your end-to-end delivery pipeline. 

Source

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Cloud computing in banking: All you need to know before moving to the cloud

According to a survey by O’Reilly, cloud adoption is rising across industries at a steady rate, with over 90% of organizations using cloud computing technology. The growth in adoption rate is evident from the last year survey that reported 88% organizations using the cloud across the globe. Now while industries have started relying on cloud services for their varied data and operational needs, there is one industry that is taking its sweet time to adopt the idea on a holistic level – Banking. 

With banks and financial institutions taking time to check every aspect of cloud from the security and privacy angle, cloud computing in banking is moving at an overly cautious speed.

However, if there is one thing that COVID-19 has taught us, it is the fact that consumers need services on their fingertips without visiting a brick and mortar shop – whether it is shopping for groceries online or managing their end-to-end banking needs. In light of this, banks, however slow they are in adopting IT cloud infrastructure and cloud computing virtualization, know that their 2030 version will be very different from what it looks now. And that they need to put strategies in place today to prepare for their future-self.

Better data security

With frequently updated software, cloud computing for banks proves to be a security-first approach for a bank’s operations. However, ensuring that the intent is met, it is very important to choose a cloud management service cloud management service that meets the following criteria:

Compliance and certifications

Performance and reliability

Next-gen technology inclusion

Migration support 

24*7 service support

Lowered infrastructure cost 

There are no fixed statistics, but the reliance of banks on on-premise systems remains a global phenomenon. Now, while through this reliance, they are able to safeguard users’ data, a big problem with it is the complex-level adaptability to organization-level changes. Any change in the IT infrastructure, workload management, etc. requires time – a time that leads to massive downtime on the customer’s ends. 

By adopting cloud services for banks, the IT infrastructure changes become more manageable, while they are able to scale their offerings on an immediate basis.  

Greater operational efficiency

Cloud environment increases the efficiency of a banking institution by manifold. By hosting their services on cloud, banks can enjoy benefits like:

Quality control

Disaster recovery 

Flexibility 

Loss prevention

Risk management 

By hosting banking portals on the cloud, the institutions are able to focus on bringing their fixed and variable expenses down with a guarantee of 99% uptime. 

Access to software applications 

Cloud computing in banking gives the institutions access to CRM and ERP software applications which are engineered to better their client relations and employee experience. Since these apps are a part of the SaaS model, the banks have complete control over them in terms of what data goes into them and scope of personalization.

Contributes towards business continuity

Through cloud computing, the banking firms get greater levels of fault tolerance, protection of data, and disaster recovery. Moreover, cloud computing provides a massive-level of redundancy and backup at low cost. The technology gives banking institutions every ingredient to make it future-proof. 

Since the cloud is on demand, the infrastructure investment gets minimized, which in turn lowers the set-up time. All of this lowers the development cycle for new products, leading to greater efficiency and expedited customer response.

Usage-based payment

For an institution as traditional as banking, the fear with technology is too deeply instilled. So, when it comes to adopting new technology, cloud gives them the freedom to adopt the service on a pay-as-you-go model.

Green IT

Transferring the banking services on cloud lowers the energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also leads to minimizing the idle time, which makes the utilization of computing power extremely efficient.

Now that we have looked into the glaring benefits of cloud computing for financial services, it is time to choose the best cloud services for banks. 

Cloud service models:

SaaS – The cloud type consists of business software and its related data, which the users can access through their web browsers. The business use cases that can be hosted on SaaS can include customer relationship management, invoicing, accounting, service desk management, and content management. 

PaaS – This cloud type is focused on providing a complete platform, for interface, apps, and database development, testing. It enables banks to streamline development, and lower the IT costs and the need for hardware, software.

IaaS – Instead of purchasing the software, data centers, and servers, this cloud model enables banks to use these resources on an outsourced model. 

Private cloud – This cloud infrastructure type is operated for a specific bank. It is usually managed by the bank itself or a third party who works from the premises. Banks are usually recommended to host their services on a private cloud as it gives them higher control and increased flexibility. A private cloud also minimizes the risk of security breach as it is deployed within the firewall of the organization.  

Public cloud – This infrastructure is open for the entire banking industry to share and is owned by the organization which sells the cloud services. Banks can opt for public cloud if they are looking for economies of scale.

Hybrid cloud – This infrastructure is composed of both private and public clouds which operate for their individual business use case. 

Cloud operating models:

Virtual captives – Under this model, there is a dedicated pool of centers and resources to help banks with their cloud operations, available on demand.

Staff augmentation – In this model, the banks gain cloud expertise by hiring people with the right skillset. The team is housed internally and allows for greater flexibility when it comes to meeting the demands in real-time. 

Outsourcing vendors – This approach makes use of offshore facilities and people to manage the cloud operations. The people and facilities, under this model, usually cater to multiple banks. 

These were the different cloud models available for a banking institution. Now, we understand that choosing between them can be tough for first-time cloud strategy. Let us make it easy for you. Here are the cloud options that we generally work around when we digitally scale a BFSI brand. 

Challenges of cloud adoption in banks

There are a number of roadblocks that stand between banks and their cloud adoption initiatives. Let us look at some of the key challenges. 

Latency

The physical distance between a data center and the cloud service provider can affect performance by introducing latency issues. This latency can lead to a delay in core banking activities like card authorization. In addition to the difference in geographical points, shifting the systems from the data center to cloud environment can also lead to extra latency. 

Data residency 

When data is hosted on the cloud, several issues of “data ownership” arise. Regulatory compliances add on to this issue as several financial institutions face government mandated limits on where they can store the data. 

Resilience 

Although the instances of outage are a lot less and widespread than the traditional IT environments, it happens. Now, unlike traditional IT outages, the impact of cloud outages are a lot more widespread as the banks face the probability of high-level data security breach and a downtime which is out of their control to manage in real-time. 

Source: cloud computing in banking

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Principles of DevOps That Make Organization Transformation Easy

The software industry has, in the last decade, witnessed a momentous change in the development process. A significant sign of this change has been that the traditional form of building software is on the verge of going obsolete, especially due to factors like –

Introduction of new technologies 

Changing market needs

Competition from digital-first companies 

Greater focus on security

To meet this paradigm shift, the IT sector has been turning to the merger of Agile processes and DevOps.

DevOps has completely changed the way businesses build and deploy software, possibly forever. Now, irrespective of whether you have applied DevOps in your software development process or not, the approach is here to stay. So, the best thing that you can do as an IT entrepreneur is learn the principles of DevOps and get an in-depth understanding of the concept for the time when you would have to incorporate it.

In this article, we are going to know what DevOps tools are, the benefits of DevOps, what is the principle of DevOps, and the best practices. We hope that by the time you reach the end of the article, you will be in a space where it would be easy to implement the technology in your business. 

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the approach of merging people, processes, and DevOps tools to create high-quality software speedily. The model combines the developers (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams into a single entity that manages the complete application lifecycle.

DevOps services company also paves the way for automation, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Development in every element of the SDLC. At its core, DevOps provides the necessary toolset to build high-quality software with minimal errors.

Understanding what DevOps is lays the foundation for knowing what to expect from its incorporation. Let us look into it in the next section.

What are the benefits of DevOps? 

The benefits of DevOps typically fall into three broad areas addressing issues of both internal and external users. Here is what to expect from your DevOps adoption. 

Speedier response to market needs 

In the present competitive digital space, businesses need to release products that the market needs. It is the only way to survive the competition. DevOps tools help businesses align themselves with what customers need and deliver the expectations rapidly. This, in turn, betters customer retention.

Better quality products released faster

The DevOps CI/CD approach leads to the fast release of high-quality applications that are free from glitches and bugs. Because of CI/CD, the errors are caught easily in the early development stages and not after the product reaches the market.

Better work environment

DevOps principles and practices lead to better communication, team collaboration, and internal cooperation while keeping everyone on the same page along the SDLC phases. This level of transparency in communication betters morale that leads to the growth of a productive and healthy work environment.

originally published on: https://appinventiv.com/blog/principles-of-devops/

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Blockchain software development

Blockchain development is the technology to hold tremendous potential to transform the working of the different sector.

A blockchain services is a decentralized digital ledger that saves transactions on thousands of computers around the globe. These are registered in a way that inhibits their subsequent modification. Blockchain technology increases the security and speeds up the exchange of information in a way that is cost-effective and more transparent. It also dispenses with third parties whose main role was to provide a trust and certification element in transactions (such as notaries and banks).

The high importance of blockchain has attracted the attention of organizations in different sectors, with banking sector being the most active at this stage. Blockchain app development company has resulted in the development of thousands of new job positions and new startups ranging from mobile payment solutions to health care applications.