The marriage of Cloud and DevOps seems to be a perfect match. Enterprises using both, Cloud and DevOps, are deriving and delivering huge value. However, if enterprises want to continue to take advantage of the Cloud-DevOps combine, then they must address a few core objectives which go beyond just questions that arise from technology.
Firstly, moving away from a product economy to a more service-led economy means that DevOps and Cloud are more services led, which has led to IaaS (infrastructure as a service) or CaaS (cloud as a service). Large teams and functions are now looking for an overall experience that is smooth, effective and collaborative and the DevOps-Cloud combine seems perfectly suited to match this one expectation. Secondly, almost all organizations are focusing on speed and innovation coupled with stability and cost efficiencies. This calls for a change in approach to work: perhaps shorter work cycles, increase in delivery frequency, and continual experimentation. Consumers are calling the shots and businesses have to have a strong feedback loop to deliver to customer expectations. DevOps and Cloud again seem suited to bring about change quickly without too much of a time lag between feedback and enhancement. Thirdly, given the world of digitalization, every employee in an organization must be responsive to the pulls and pressures of market and customer needs. This requires agility, decisiveness, and a whole lot of automation, again afforded by the powerful DevOps combination.
Cloud – how it measures up
Cloud is a direct response to the need for agility. Initially, people saw Cloud primarily as a way to save money from capex to opex. Today, enterprises realize that the value of Cloud is that it helps in bringing about speedy resolution without waste of time or effort. Cloud services today can take care of provisioning hardware or other data center operational tasks, freeing up time for IT teams to focus on strategic value-add. Cloud enables greater business agility by making IT infrastructure more pliable. It lets companies conduct digital service relationships with their customers.
DevOps – why choose it?
The 2017 State of DevOps report published by DORA and Puppet Labs, revealed the benefits of adopting DevOps resulted in high performing organizations, automation and the fact that DevOps is not restricted to any one industry alone and can run horizontally across different verticals. Other research has shown that combining agile and DevOps software development methodologies resulted in a 41% increase in operational efficiency and 63% better chance of opening up new pipelines.
Cloud and DevOps – an inevitable marriage of convenience?
Research commissioned by CA of over a 1,000 IT professionals to answer a fundamental question: how well has the combination of Cloud and DevOps worked for you? revealed some interesting facts:
a) 48% of the sample used Cloud and/or DevOps, but were slow movers, meaning they were not too far along on the maturity cycle
b) Then there were the extremists – those who used either one of the technologies extensively, not necessarily both together
c) 18% of organizations were reported to be advanced users of both DevOps and Cloud and were called the Delivery Disrupters.
The same research revealed, unsurprisingly, that metrics related to speed, quality, predictability, cost and user experience saw the most improvement by the Delivery Disrupters ie those who use both, DevOps and Cloud.
It seems evident that individually, Cloud and DevOps have several factors in their favour. When used together, organizations can see significant improvements. DevOps and Cloud both are better together, irrespective of geography, vertical, or industry. So what are you thinking? Is it a match that you will go for? Call us and let’s chat about how we at DOU can bring about effective and significant change in your software delivery performance using this perfect match.
