Sibusiso Motsa
8 September 2022
Enterprises are continually looking for modernization that helps them be more nimble, resilient, efficient, and agile to keep relevant in today’s market while providing cost-effective and reliable services to their clients.
The rapidly growing and ever-changing digital landscape of doing business has seen exponential growth in the uptake of cloud computing, analytics, and artificial intelligence. There is an app for almost everything, underpinned by a paradigm shift across processes, people, and frequent deployment of new features.
Supporting these frequent application enhancements, changes, testing, and release management can take up a significant chunk of time for the IT team, potentially causing a bottleneck for the business.
IT teams grapple with application changes, infrastructure changes, check performance issues, unforeseen test cases and more which may lead to friction between the business, developers, and support teams where the root cause may be:
- A lack of an operating framework to manage the end-to-end development cycle
- Lack of shared visibility and working in siloes
- Lack of tool usage and technologies in the development and support spectrum.
This is where Managed DevOps comes into the picture for efficient service delivery of application development and support.
What is Managed DevOps?
In a broader context, DevOps is a collection of practices and tools which combine software development and operations to shorten lifecycles and support continuous development delivery.
DevOps at its core, fosters cooperation and collaboration between the two historically divided and siloed IT groups: application developers and IT operations teams. From another view, Managed DevOps is a chain of processes that blends methodologies of continuous integration and continuous delivery or continuous deployment to create and deploy applications efficiently. The ultimate true beneficiary of DevOps principles is the customer who gets needed product updates with as little friction or wait time as possible.
The Managed DevOps application lifecycle phases are illustrated by the image below where the key focus is on the operations phase. This phase encompasses maintaining, monitoring, and troubleshooting applications in production environments, including hybrid or public clouds. The overarching goal for DevOps teams is system reliability, high availability, strong security, and zero downtime.
Implementation of Managed DevOps principles across the incremental phases of the application development and support lifecycle delivers operational excellence in application support. The extent of the DevOps adoption and constant monitoring of the potential impact helps IT teams improve flexibilities, user responsiveness, and customer-centricity.
Why your application needs Managed DevOps
With this approach, IT teams can fail fast in new scenarios and learn from errors without exposing the business to unnecessary risks. Application support is improved due to the ability to:
- Reduce application support time through quick rectification of issues
- Gain real-time insights into app environments across complexities (cloud, data centres, etc.)
- Spend more time on innovation and less time on support and maintenance
- Share a standard view and open communication channels for complete control
- Build more stable apps to ensure minimal defects with each release.
The enforcing of Managed DevOps guidelines and tools enables efficiencies in the application support to be passed back to the organization as a cost-benefit, faster response time, stable systems and process-driven application development and support system.
DevOps at Integrove
At Integrove we embrace DevOps practices where application support and monitoring play a critical role in our app development solutions. As we provide solutions that run on a 24/7 app economy, our app support and monitoring team uses modern cloud solutions to observe the performance and health of the app’s resources to maintain high availability while ensuring zero downtime.