How to Supercharge DevOps to Reduce Time to Market
More businesses are using DevOps in their software development, and DevOps is increasingly critical to digital transformation. However, despite the ongoing shift to automation, manual processes often persist in app development. When they don’t work, the whole DevOps approach can break down, and time to market is vastly increased.
Enterprises are increasingly shifting to platforms like ServiceNow to manage business operations and deliver applications. However, beyond many initial efficiencies, this platform-based approach presents unique challenges and opportunities for applying DevOps principles.
For example, fixed release schedules limit when changes can be made, adding another layer of difficulty. Developers may spend up to 20% of their time tackling manual challenges, further adding to delays and restricting their capacity. These inconsistencies can create conflicts, which, in turn, impact operational effectiveness.
Industry surveys - run by everyone from McKinsey to independent vendors - suggest highly skilled developers spend anywhere from 17% to over 30% of their time bogged down with low-value, tedious tasks that don’t leverage their expertise. This misallocation of talent leads to developers spending significant time on mundane, repetitive work instead of applying their problem-solving skills to create innovative solutions. This inefficiency, combined with rigid release schedules, is creating a perfect storm of delays and conflicts that impact the entire platform development lifecycle.
Breaking Free From Manual Processes
The rise of platform-based development on enterprise platforms is changing how we think about DevOps. While traditional DevOps focuses on source code and text files, platform development requires a different approach.
Companies need to think about platform-specific DevOps. Traditional DevOps tools don't always translate directly to platform development. It’s time to think about how to apply DevOps principles in a platform context, where the "code" might be configurations, workflows, plugins, and integrations rather than traditional programming assets.
How Do You Apply DevOps Principles in a Platform Context?
It’s important to consider consistency across instances: In platform development, maintaining consistency across different instances (dev, test, prod) is crucial. Unlike traditional environments where code repositories ensure consistency, platform instances can diverge significantly.
Implementing robust instance management practices is key to maintaining DevOps principles in this context. By leveraging advanced automation and adopting more flexible release strategies, these companies are not only boosting developer productivity but also accelerating time-to-market for critical business applications. As enterprises grow their use of platforms, ensuring scalability will become crucial. DevOps practices need to address how to manage and deploy to multiple instances efficiently.
This shift has implications beyond just IT efficiency. It's enabling a new era of agility in enterprise software development, where professional and citizen developers can contribute to innovation without being bogged down by technical overhead.
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Automating the Platform Pipeline
Companies must also prioritize automating workflows for platforms. While automation is a core DevOps principle, it looks different in platform development. It’s important to focus on automating platform-specific tasks like configuration changes, data/update migrations, and instance cloning, rather than forcing platform assets into traditional DevOps toolsets.
Continuous integration and delivery for platforms must also be a top consideration. CI/CD in a platform context often does not involve merging and deploying code. It requires synchronizing configurations/instances, testing integrations, and ensuring integrity and similarity across instances.
Governance and compliance are also critical. As enterprises rely more on platforms for critical operations, maintaining governance and compliance becomes increasingly complex. DevOps practices need to incorporate robust audit trails and access controls specific to platform development.
Companies must also conquer bridging the skills gap. There's a growing need for professionals who understand both DevOps principles and specific enterprise platforms. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for organizations and individuals.
By adapting DevOps principles to platform-based development, enterprises can accelerate their digital transformation efforts, improve consistency across their technology stack, and deliver value to customers faster. The key is understanding that while the principles remain the same, the implementation needs to be tailored to the unique characteristics of platform development.
The Future of DevOps
As the demand for custom enterprise applications continues to grow, the ability to efficiently manage complex platform environments will likely become a key differentiator for businesses across sectors.
To tackle these problems, DevOps specialists need better instance management to eliminate delays, boost developer capacity, and help streamline development and release processes. On-demand release capabilities can allow for the deployment of updates, features, and even entire apps at any time. Adding automation within platforms can also help eliminate manual deployment and troubleshooting, increasing developer capacity—this includes citizen developers.
Ultimately, if DevOps can get instance management right, they can support deployment and release optimization, streamlining processes, minimizing errors, and accelerating time to market.
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