DevOps Services For Startups: The Facts Behind Its Reign Over IT Enterprise
Introduction:
In the coming years, technology and software development will take over every sphere of our daily life. This fast-paced age demands every business to deliver products quickly without compromising their quality. Likewise, even startups are required to do so if they want to stay in the game, and DevOps services for startups play a crucial role in that.
Short production time and maximum efficiency let businesses thrive in the market. They have to grow as they mature with time. The more one company can constantly adapt to this change, the longer it can continue to fight for dominance. DevOps service providers help these companies get a headstart with polished tools fit for business growth.
What Are DevOps services?
DevOps is the combination of two words - development and operations and this terminology is prevalent in the IT industry. It is not a particular framework or software that developers use. Instead, it is a set of methodologies, practices, and tools that can benefit technology-dependent and technological fronts of businesses by mixing software development and IT operations. In many instances, security and QA branches are also considered to be a part of DevOps.
In their 2015 book, DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective, Len Bass, Ingo Weber, and Liming Zhu tried to define DevOps. For them, it is an assorted collection of practices whose primary goal is to use the least time for production while maintaining high quality. Shared ownership, workflow automation, and rapid feedback are the most common characteristics of DevOps consulting services.
Many DevOps services have their roots in the Agile methodology. They use several types of toolchains to achieve success, right from the development to the delivery processes. These types of toolchains are:
- Source code related works
- Building and integrating
- Testing tools for continuous assessment
- Packaging and pre-deployment staging
- Release management
- Configuration of infrastructure
- Monitoring user experience (UX) and providing support and maintenance
Why Do Startups Need DevOps Services?
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery Operations (CI/CD):
DevOps implement some core practices that help reduce the testing expenses, automation of some Quality Assurance (QA), and release tools. They also allow the software to go through the release building processes quickly. These practices are carried out in the following order:
1. Continuous Integration
2. Continuous Delivery
3. Continuous Deployment
With continuous integration, the code base of the developer is frequently updated. If every automated test that is run on the software detects some critical change in the code, this practice allows the developers to combine this change with the master code.
Next comes uploading the build and all the changes that it had been through to a platform where they will go through several testing and production processes. This is called continuous delivery.
Continuous deployment is the way updates and automated releases of software are shared with the clients. Every time the developers log some software changes on their end regarding the client’s work, they will let the client know the same by this process. By this, the IT department welcomes more user feedback and testimonials, which helps them stay motivated right on track. These regular check-in updates prevent developers from rushing through the last few minutes as they have to report their progress and changes to the client directly.
The Infrastructure As Code Practice:
The practice of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in a DevOps consulting company aids in maintaining the infrastructures like virtual machines and networks of the company. It prevents environment drift in the release pipeline, which is essentially a dissonance between the company’s environment of testing tools and production conditions. This creates almost invisible bugs that cannot be caught during the testing. They can cause problems later in deployment processes and make significant lags in the process, requiring extra costs for repair.
With the implementation of the Infrastructure as Code methodology, a considerable decrease in these disruptions is observed. These are disruptions between environments that are not documented and may occur suddenly. IaC works well with all the infrastructures and syncs them. This allows the testing to be done quickly and accurately.
Automation And Infrastructure Management:
Many tasks can be achieved quickly by running infrastructure automation. The tools one requires to carry out automation services and smooth infrastructure management are often supplied by the DevOps service providers. It helps spare the employees from stressing too much over tasks that can be easily automated, especially routine and repetitive tasks.
With infrastructure management solutions, one can fix them to notify automatically whenever some emergency breaches or system changes happen. They can help to identify and provide solutions to any problems immediately. Challenging infrastructures can be easily tackled by automation without making them unscalable.
Automated Testing:
QA is an essential part of any startup, and automated testing can help perform this accurately since DevOps can especially focus on this methodology. Automation increases the testing frequency and makes faster deployment possible. It does away with the maximum chunk of errors that can only be spotted when testing is done several times manually, and it sets the developers free to work on more crucial tasks.
Management Of Security:
The security team of DevOps services is often called DevSecOps. It helps companies guide their clients to reinforce security measures right at the beginning of the build and development processes instead of the last few steps. These costs are lower during development while providing more reliability of the system.
By outsourcing DevSecOps, the companies can get suggestions on:
- cloud security threats
- DDoS attacks
- any potential security breaches in the system
- testing of security and compliance
- firewall services
- VPN firewall configuration.
Automation Of Monitoring And Logging:
Errors that no longer require human supervision to be rectified are implemented besides automated testing. According to Opsview, problem automation involves the system automatically trying to fix whatever is wrong with the received commands. This is easily achieved by monitoring and logging errors which can be repeated and fixed by the system itself. Collection of data on corporate app performance, released products, Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) are all a part of this process.
According to Statista, e-commerce shares hold 21.8% of the world’s total retail sales. This wouldn’t have been possible within such a short time if a developer had to fix an error manually every time since the audience does not have the patience to sit through a lengthy process like that. DevOps service providers, with their automated monitoring, make this easy.
Release Management:
DevOps services for startups provide long-lasting support even after the end of the production cycle; with the help of a detailed explanation of the tools, the release management team of DevOps aids in streamlining the processes. Their top-class release management depends on customized automation tools, accurate scheduling, and software to coordinate the team.
Configuration Management:
Some error fixes can be more complicated at the last stages of the production stage. Manually managing them can make it more vulnerable than before. Even the slightest discrepancy between the configurations required and the configurations done then causes the system to collapse during production. Manual configuration can also lead to unnecessary resource waste.
With DevOps, startups can automate configuration management right from the start to avoid human supervision or participation. Infrastructure configurations in DevOps are stored as a single code base. This makes managing the configuration of all resources easier.
Why Do Startups Usually Outsource DevOps?
A Collective Effort:
DevOps is the area where the developers, designers, testers, and administrators converge to deliver a product seamlessly. The development team collaborates with the operations team to fix errors and bugs and develop long-lasting solutions. All these tasks would have been skipped until the last minute in the absence of DevOps. The product goes through several testing stages right from the development processes, and the components are checked for their effectiveness during virtualization at the same time.
Wide Pool Of Talents:
Booking the services of an already formed DevOps team exposes the business to a vast pool of talents where everyone has something unique to offer. Trying to put together an in-house team locally might be difficult for the business owner. DevOps engineers usually are affiliated with such teams, making it difficult to hire one solely for the company. It is equally challenging to select developers with very niche areas of expertise, whereas it is easier to find them among a group of DevOps service providers.
Distribution Of Tasks:
Outsourcing a DevOps team means the employer will be able to distribute tasks better among developers of different calibers. Commonly, employers want to assign complex tasks to the experts while assigning the juniors less taxing jobs to learn hands-on.
Effective Employment:
By allowing the employers to choose their recruit, DevOps consulting services make hiring even easier. Employers can also leave it up to the service provider to select the best candidate suited for the job profile. In short, the employing company can exercise as much control as it desires over the whole hiring process by choosing to be an active or passive participant.
Extensive Documentation And Employee Training:
The companies that meet DevOps outsourcing demands prioritize their employees first by giving them the required professional training, teamwork ethics, certifications, and the latest technological tools. An outsourced DevOps team will ensure good documentation of solutions. These are easy to maintain by the company after deployment and can be reused in the future during more DevOps tasks.
Some Points Startups Should Keep In Mind While Using DevOps:
Use Of Cloud Technology:
Cloud technology has become an essential tool in the delivery process of the service provided by the DevOps consulting company. This technology is no longer an afterthought, and it has become an integral part of software solutions. Startups will gain immensely from the ample storage space cloud technologies can provide easily.
Outsourcing cloud services for DevOps can help the company migrate its infrastructure to the cloud or transfer it from one cloud to another. They allow the companies to avail better automation technology. Cloud services can also help to calculate and optimize expenses for the cloud infrastructure of the business.
Cloud services can improve even the security of the system. It centralizes development, testing, and deployment activities on one platform that is accessible from anywhere. Increased flexibility of the infrastructure can help the business to scale it anytime according to its suitability.
DevOps Templates As a Team-building Motivation:
DevOps services for startups offer many centralized, standardized, and customized templates. This maintains a sense of uniformity among all the departments of the organization with a dedicated DevOps team. It builds a sense of belonging to the business and motivates the developers to take the business forward.
Rather than an approval board model, many high-performing business organizations are using the Centre of Excellence methodology. By this, the developers have more room to consult and share their thoughts. This will help startups have a common ground where all the departments, including those in charge of DevOps, can discuss the best business practices.
The Importance Of Back-end Operations:
Back-end operations have garnered more importance from developers as a part of the post-delivery process. Previously, the client’s end features were mostly focused on, but that way of thinking is now backdated. Progressive startups and their DevOps consulting company focus more on the back-end since it is what keeps the business running smoothly.
Recovery Updates And Error Fixing:
Success does not come without failure but being able to recover from it is of the highest essence. There are bound to be some errors at first, but as long as the developers work together with the rest of the teams to recognize and solve them, the company will continue to grow. Future recovery, detection, and restoration can be made this way swiftly.
Conclusion:
Statista’s reports say that in 2020, 2.17% of additional people have converted to online shopping. This is an almost impossible figure to achieve, but big businesses that started as startups have reached this height with a functional DevOps team. It is no wonder that DevOps consulting services have indeed taken the IT world by storm.