How DevOps Can Rapidly Eliminate Waste From Software Development?
Did you know, In the retail business, excessive inventory is considered a loss of revenue? Goods waiting to be converted to cash are a big risk. The longer they sit in the storage, the harder it becomes to sell them. That money should have been in the firm’s bank account. Instead, it’s getting rotten in the storage.
Likewise, software features waiting for deployment are equivalent of excessive inventory. Stacking up features for quarterly and annual deployment means money getting rotten in branches. These features could already be making money if deployed to production.
So you ask, why so many software teams create waste anyhow? Before answering the question, let me tell you something.
Before the invention of Air Brakes (1869), trains crashed often. Railroad companies employed Brakemen who ran from car to car to apply the brakes. That was the only engineering way to stop a moving train. It was risky, error-prone, unsafe, and inconvenient. Many Brakemen were killed on the job. Trains stopped either after or before the station platform, leading to inconvenience for passengers. This also slowed down the adoption of trains leading to the loss for investors.
But, the scene changed once automatic Air Brakes were developed. Trains stopped when and where required. Train journey became safer, faster, common and widely adopted. Railroad companies started making the profit than on. If George Westinghouse had developed Air Brakes decades early, humanity could have rescued many Brakemen.
Likewise, software teams have been creating waste because of the absence of the right technology. Like the Brakemen, IT operations have been running around performing infrastructure setup and maintenance by hand. However, with the emergence of DevOps, they can finally settle down. DevOps is the Air Brakes of IT support and it is finally here to relieve software teams (that need support) and IT operations (that provide the support).
DevOps brings new tools and methods that have made it simple to manage infrastructure.
It is assisting software teams to deliver code faster and safely. And manage infrastructure in a predictive and repetitive manner.
DevOps also has the potential to alter the way we think about the software itself. For example, once we get into production quicker, sooner we can realize a feature’s potential. Receiving feedback early will anchor our direction. If a feature serves well, we keep it, or else we just roll it back.
The term DevOps is a union of Development and Operations in which a developer is expected to carry out both system administration along with software development. But in an efficient manner i.e. programmatically. It is also referred to as “Infrastructure as a code”. Manual, boring, slow, error-prone, and inconvenient IT operations are automated in this process. Thus freeing-up humans so we can do things we are better at.
In my next article, I will discuss the features of DevOps in detail.
