What to Look for in a Modern DevOps Solution

By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

Businesses today have faced greater levels of uncertainty than ever before. As employees and customers demand higher-quality digital experiences, companies must ensure their DevOps processes are modern and capable of keeping up with the complexities of today’s business.

To be able to operationally address these challenges and opportunities, businesses are looking to their IT teams to play a critical role in responding to customer demand, while at the same time keeping tabs on growing compliance demands, shifting business strategy and the latest technological advancements.

DevOps has emerged as a way for IT teams to evolve and improve products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development. But current DevOps solutions may not live up to their needs given just how complex business has become, as many existing solutions lack flexibility, don’t have complex compliance reporting or are simply outdated.

As organizations look to modernize, there are few key features best-of-breed solutions now have.

Here’s what to look for:

Automated deployment and reporting

Deploying multi-platform applications is complicated, ripe for errors, and often involves multiple developers from myriad disciplines and their approving managers. Whether your organization is writing and executing complex scripts, or doing manual deployments, any DevOps solution that requires development teams to complete these processes without automation is creating unnecessary and taxing work.

A modern DevOps solution allows employees to automate the deployment process. Whether it’s managing deliverables, requesting approvals or any of the steps in between, automated processes result in significantly lower risk of introducing errors and allow developers to focus on more value-added work. As a result, businesses benefit from greater productivity, better protection on service-level agreements (SLAs) and improved sustainability.

Flexibility to adapt to IT team demands

Every organization is different, and a DevOps solution that forces your company to comply with predefined development and deployment processes hurts your team’s productivity and effectiveness. Today’s DevOps solutions should be flexible to adapt to the demands of your team, the applications they create and current processes. If your solution is too rigid and complicated to customize, it’s time to switch.

Technology is going to continue to evolve and your DevOps solutions need to be able to keep pace with changing needs. Since no one can predict what the future holds, it is critical to choose a software partner who responds and adapts to changing market dynamics and the associated requirements proactively.

Ease of implementation and use

Time saved is an important metric for any DevOps administrator. If implementing your solution is a significant time investment, the time it might save in application delivery may be offset by resources necessary to ensure implementation. A truly effective DevOps solution is easy to implement, easy to configure and easy to use.

A modern DevOps solution accounts for asynchronous schedules by confirming that every team member knows their responsibilities and deadlines before code is promoted. Web and mobile developers typically follow agile practices, and some teams even evolve past agile and into continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). On the other hand, IBM i developers often use a waterfall approach, prioritizing completeness over faster iteration. It is critical that DevOps supports these multiple ways of working. If your solution lacks this capacity, your risk of having to back out changes – assuming your solution can do this – and you risk spending more on resources fixing the problem. This leads to wasted time and money, so aligning web and IBM i development teams is critical.

Comprehensive compliance reporting

Development teams understand the frustration caused by the loss of time and money due to compliance reporting and audit preparation. It is time lost to work that doesn’t specifically drive revenue or improve user experiences. When teams are still writing their own reports, mining data, keeping months of email history and archiving paper copies just to be prepared for the next audit, your current system is costing you much more than you realize.

A modern DevOps solution supplies automation and reporting of your software development and change processes, allowing you to track, view and monitor everything vital to satisfying ITIL, COBIT, SEI/CMMI, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, Basel II and other regulations. Best practices are enforced without having to think about it, ensuring separation of duties at a granular level. Comprehensive DevOps solutions also include special report templates to give auditors exactly what they need. Without the distractions of complex reporting, your team can stay focused on building quality software.

Deploy your applications with confidence

Your DevOps solution should form to the way you do business – not vice versa. Evaluating your solution ensures your development teams are able to focus on project deliverables and can steer clear of unnecessary disruptions so that your organization can deploy applications with confidence.

To learn more, visit Rocket Software.

IT Leadership, Software Development