Software Engineering Insights

In a time-to-market oriented business, DevOps with its open and Agile attitude help organizations to deliver business value quicker, adapt to change easier and overcome IT complexity with collaboration and automation.

Infrastructure services consume a large part of IT budgets. It is therefore imperative for organizations to focus on cost and productivity of infra services to best utilize them.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the top 2 cloud service providers with a combined market share of more than 50% of the total cloud market. If there aren’t financial constraints, these two are the obvious choices when opting for cloud services. However, choosing one of them can be tricky.

AWS was the first to offer Infrastructure as Code (IaC) via AWS CloudFormation as a part of AWS DevOps. It enables developers and systems administrators to easily create and manage a collection of related AWS resources. They can provision and update them in an orderly and predictable way. Developers can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create their own templates. The concept of IaC is as old as the practice of DevOps. There are many experts who argue that DevOps wouldn’t be possible without the use of IaC.

The cloud-native approach to software development has brought a paradigm shift to how applications scale and self-manage themselves, as the demand surge.

73% of organizations have at least one application, or a portion of their computing infrastructure already in the cloud – 17% plan to do so within the next 12 months. - 2018 Cloud Computing Survey (IDG)

Over the years, organizations have been implementing Agile methodologies to speed up the software development cycle. While Agile was initially embraced for development process, it has progressively expanded into other downstream areas, i.e. IT and Operations. It has helped team to streamline the development process, receive timely feedback for improvements, has ensured that the entire process picks a pace for on time product delivery.

In the uber-competitive business world, unplanned downtime and issues with production environment can be detrimental. It can put customer trust, revenue, and productivity to halt, which is un-affordable for businesses of any size.

 DevOps represents a shift in IT culture. With adoption of agile and lean practices, the software development approach ensures rapid IT service delivery.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a software development practice, wherein isolated updates to a code base by developers are immediately tested and reported. CI aims at early detection of bugs in code or defects in software functionality. The entire process works in conjugation with automated testing tools that ascertains Continuous Testing (CT) and Continuous Deployment (CD) of the software.