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Night and day. Science and art. 1s and 0s.
For years now, software development teams and operations/system administrators have maintained this kind of yin and yang duality, pushing each other in opposing, but complementary, directions.
We’re all familiar with the dynamic of the IT department. Typically, the development team’s modus operandi is to deliver new features to end users. Meanwhile, operations/system administrators focus on liability for the software, service, run time and reliability.
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In the best case scenario, the tension between these two teams creates a productive balance. But, all too often, that’s not the case. Instead, the teams can become resentful, each seeing the other as an obstacle to business success.
Enter the concept of DevOps, which fortunately, can eliminate polarization like this forever. To learn more on the topic of DevOps register for this webinar.
DevOps is a new IT discipline that brings order to an otherwise chaotic and complex world of application/service development, testing, deployment, scaling and monitoring. It also helps ensure software quality, security, availability, reliability and performance. Enterprise IT professionals that want to upgrade their skills can learn more by attending Upgrade your IT Skills with DevOps Principles.
Ultimately, by nullifying the turf wars between siloed, independent teams, DevOps creates a single, unified approach that is responsible for the success of the entire application lifecycle.
And, it gets even better. These days, DevOps can become even more powerful when combined with the cloud computing.
The cloud enables DevOps Teams to work faster, with more flexibility and at a higher rate of total efficiency. Together, DevOps and the cloud present a compelling, virtually unstoppable force (forgive the pun).
Is it time to instrument DevOps principles and the cloud in your organization? Most likely, it is, and to help you get started, here are three key reasons why DevOps and the cloud are perfect for business success:
Cloud Automation
The cloud is driven by the automation and virtualization of infrastructure. Cloud automation solutions like Skytap enable enterprises to deliver dynamic IT workloads by utilizing scalable, efficient cloud computing resources accessed and managed through a self-service web UI.
Today’s dynamic workloads, such as development and test, application migration and IT Ops, are critical for business success. However, because traditional IT infrastructure lacks the agility and flexibility required to support these workloads, project delays have become the norm. The cloud enables infrastructure to be ready on-demand to support today’s dynamic workloads and therefore providing DevOps teams more agility for application development and testing.
Self-Service Cloud
DevOps teams and more specifically Developers, engineers, and QA managers need self-service cloud solutions that increase agility and enhance collaboration across geographically dispersed teams. The cloud empowers DevOps teams with key requirements such as configurability, self-service access, collaboration, visibility and control.
Solutions, such as Skytap, let DevOps teams utilize these features with the business and technical applications they already know and use. (This capability is especially important for DevOps teams that do not want to rewrite applications currently in use!) In other words, the application rules the cloud and ultimately dictates how Operations is run and managed.
The cloud can empower developers and testers to work in parallel streams without constraints. For example, if the QA team in an Enterprise organization finds a bug/defect in an application, it’s often difficult to replicate the problem. Typically, before moving on, the team has to stop their workflow and provide someone else access to the environment to troubleshoot.
In the worst-case scenario, the team may have to build out a copy to reproduce the bug -an exercise that’s far from agile and potentially costly from a time and resource perspective. Solutions like Skytap remedy these problem areas by creating parallel streams and snapshots of environments quickly on-demand.
Visibility and Control
DevOps teams using cloud resources need to maintain important corporate policies and procedures. Cloud solutions with built-in management capabilities can help them achieve that goal. The latest cloud solutions can provide detailed usage reports and control mechanisms to manage deployment, monitoring, failure recovery, operating system maintenance, system configuration and overall performance.
No matter the size of the organization, these solutions offer teams greater visibility and control while managing computing resources, quotas and security policies. What’s more, all of this can be achieved even as the technologies empower DevOps teams with more self-service autonomy, providing more agility for faster and better software application delivery.
DevOps teams are looking for solutions that will enable rapid deployment of public, private, or hybrid clouds to handle surges related to increased cycles for run builds, tests and deployments of software applications. Solutions like Skytap Cloud solve the right kind of problems, enabling DevOps teams with toolsets to optimize the application development lifecycle.
Acquiring skills in this new IT discipline will enable you to bring order to an otherwise chaotic and complex world of agile application development, testing and scaling. Join us and learn from industry experts on how companies are transitioning from “Old IT” methodologies to the “Cloud IT” DevOps model. Sign up now.
About the Author: Nate Odell is Director of Marketing at Skytap, a leading provider of cloud automation solutions. He is an industry veteran with a successful 11-year career in B2B marketing for Technology Startups. Follow Nate on Twitter @N8Odell or @Skytap.
Photo by trublueboy
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