The Cloud and DevOps are made for each other. Both allow businesses to speed product time-to-market, both move beyond traditional processes with streamlined new approaches, and both require cultural changes to be fully successful. And when used together, the results are greater than the sum of the parts.
DevOps is a software development technique that integrates the previously somewhat segregated disciplines of operations, quality assurance, and development. In its fullest expression, DevOps optimizes collaboration among those teams, focuses communication on their inter-connected tasks, increases the use of automation, and leads to a practice of continuous product integration and delivery. In short, DevOps replaces long traditional development cycles with agile practices that are speeded by reducing the barriers between development, QA, and operations.
The cloud is the best computing environment for enabling DevOps. The ease of provisioning computing resources is unmatched, cloud scalability allows testing and deployment for any type and size of application, most and eventually all cloud processes can be automated, and the cloud lets you reach developers and customers, wherever they may be.
So, how can you take advantage of the great benefits of DevOps?
First, as with all changes that will have a broad impact on your business, executive management must be fully committed to these new practices. Their support must be visible within the company to help transform the culture to match the new way of doing business. Pragmatically, the cultural changes will be accompanied by creation of new roles, development of new skills, and definition and refinement of new processes.
Second, new DevOps-compatible processes must be identified and adapted to your business. These practices are evolving and you’re working to change cultures, so finding approaches that work for your people and goals is appropriate. They will inevitably include agile techniques, some level of continuous delivery to QA and operations, and probably live deployment techniques. However, issues like how often you need to deploy to customers, or how complex your applications are, will influence which parts of your DevOps processes to optimize.
Third, you need the software tools that best fit the DevOps model. This is where EDB’s Postgres Plus Cloud Database [PPCD] enters the picture. PPCD is a great match for DevOps, providing self-service operation that allows developers to provision and deploy their own databases. That allows developers to start performing tasks previously handled by operations and/or IT. Meanwhile, operations/IT can still retain control over which approved databases can be used by developers by configuring PPCD to provide only those database versions that have been approved for use.
PPCD enables DevOps in other ways. The ease-of use of provisioning and deploying databases make tasks that might have taken days in a physical datacenter take just minutes in the cloud. And once in operation, PPCD’s automatic scalability features ensure it is always operating at optimal performance for the number of users and load on the database and its storage. PPCD and DevOps will definitely speed your time-to-market and ROI.
Over the coming months, I will discuss other DevOps issues and how businesses can transition to the new high-velocity world of software development and deployment in the cloud. Please check back often.
You’re also invited to my upcoming webinar, scheduled for July 15, 2015 at 11 AM EDT, “DevOps Culture and Enablement with Postgres Plus Cloud Database”.