In my role, I frequently talk to organizations about their top priorities for their software applications. Time and again, speed to market wins the day. They consistently say that getting to market quickly with new products and features that enable real-time engagement with their customers is their number one goal. And, it’s for this reason that Agile software development has become increasingly important to organizations of all industries and sizes.
After getting to market quickly, a strong number two concern is support. Developers need to get the feature out, but Operations needs to ensure they don’t break anything doing it. I’ll cover this important topic in a future blog post. For now, we’ll focus on the Dev side.
Rapid Iteration, Lots of Feedback
The age of six to 12 month or longer development cycles is in the past. Today, modern application development is pacing at one week, two week, and 30-day development cycles. Using an Agile software development framework gives organizations a method and process to quickly and easily put out product—feature by feature. Opting to put out minimum viable product and then iterating on a rapid release schedule allows organizations to quickly deliver on what customers are looking for and evolve their products rapidly, with a lot of customer feedback.
Agile might not be easy, but all organizations should be motivated to rise to the challenge. Those that do this well are innovating faster than their competition. According to research from McKinsey and Company, “companies that are deploying agile at scale have accelerated their innovation by up to 80%.” [1] McKinsey & Company's Santiago Comella-Dorda delivered a keynote address about agile deployment during EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Vision 2017 conference; he explains the importance of organizations working toward this framework in this short video.
Innovate or Be Late
The new reality in today’s market is innovate, or be outpaced. That is why almost all of our customers express their need to be more agile. Agile on the application side of the house is fairly clear cut, and many online resources are available to help developers plan next steps. But, when it comes to database and DevOps, most organizations are still trying to figure out the best path to move forward.
Our clients often ask us to assess their current infrastructure and determine what changes they can make to increase their speed and align to best practices. We know that enhancements made on the database side to speed development will make it easier for our customers to deliver software updates more frequently. That is why EDB Postgres provides an amazing set of core features and extensions that really allow developers to rapidly deliver on initiatives, whether it's a startup or enterprise.
Enterprise Tools From Postgres Experts
Even though every organization is a little bit different, a common area we see for improvement is deployment. For example, service catalogs and configuration management systems tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep. However, with EDB Postgres Ark, we go a mile deep because we are subject matter experts in Postgres.
EDB Postgres Ark is the DBaaS infrastructure that makes it easy for app developers to build, deploy and maintain applications on multiple cloud infrastructures including Amazon EC2, OpenStack, and very soon, Microsoft Azure. This allows you better command and control of databases deployments. We can also plug EDB Postgres Ark into your service catalogs so we can streamline into your current process.
Additionally, we just announced EDB Postgres Advanced Server in a Container. It's highly scalable and highly reliable, with all the same capabilities in a container as it has on bare metal and virtual machines. Developers can pull down a Docker image of EDB Postgres, and have confidence that they have decades of reliability built into their image. It takes years of EDB Postgres reliability and familiarity and puts it into a container environment for developers and testing teams to use on-demand.
Your Idea as Fast as Possible
The developer journey is unique. Every organization is a little bit different, with different programming languages, and different problems to solve. But, there is one thing all developers have in common. When your organization has an idea, you need to deliver on it. That is what we do—help you deliver your idea as fast as possible.
For more information on how EDB can provide a 360 solution for your development shop’s unique requirements, contact us at sales@edbpostgres.com.
Taylor Graham is a Field CTO at EnterpriseDB.
[1] An Operating Model for Company-wide Agile Development, by Santiago Comella-Dorda, Swati Lohiya, and Gerard Speksnijder, May 2016