How Transitioning to DevOps Speeds Up Software Builds

If you’ve ever participated in a software development project, then you already know what it feels like. The code is prepared, and everybody is thrilled to do the latest update, but then, all of a sudden, everything slows down.

Testing gets postponed, builds take eternity, and then you realize that the release time will have to be rescheduled. In the past, unfortunately, this wasn’t perceived as anything unusual for the development teams.

All of these inconveniences were completely normal for them; however, things have dramatically changed in the meantime, for the better! And that’s all thanks to DevOps, which more and more organizations employ.

Transitioning to it means that your enterprise is ready for some serious changes in terms of communication, collaboration, etc. And this surely comes with numerous benefits that will be discussed.

Breaking Down The Silos

When it comes to traditional software development, operations teams and developers frequently work separately. Developers concentrate on writing code, while operations teams deal with deployments, production environments, and infrastructure.

This level of separation typically results in bottlenecks. Developers might complete their work, only to realize that the deployment environment wasn’t fully ready. Operations teams could get the code with little documentation.

Every handoff may lead to postponement, miscommunication, and many other issues. And that’s precisely why DevOps is here. It is designed to alter this dynamic by stimulating collaboration right from the start.

Rather than passing work from one sector to another, everyone will invest their time and effort to accomplish the same goals. In other words, when good communication is present, the likelihood of major problems is radically reduced.

Technology And Collaboration Are Equally Relevant

At first glance, you may think that DevOps revolves solely around tools, but that’s not really the situation. Although it incorporates them, it prioritizes culture, as well! Accomplished DevOps teams communicate all the time.

Developers, operations engineers, and others contribute throughout the development lifecycle. For example, businesses oftentimes uncover that the MeteorOps team approach to DevOps highlights shared responsibility, along with the close collaboration between technical teams. Regardless of the particular framework that a company uses, the principle always stays the same: when everybody joins forces instead of working in separate departments, software is a lot faster, more reliable, etc.

Therefore, it’s of huge importance to accentuate the role of collaboration because without it, there’s no success, and the risk of dealing with a number of different issues is increased.

The Influence Of Automation

One of the main reasons DevOps accelerates software builds is due to automation. Just think of all the repetitive tasks that are part of software development. Compiling code, running tests, packaging applications, checking dependencies, supervising systems, and deploying builds are very time-consuming when they are handled manually.

With DevOps practices, these tasks become a lot less tedious because they are automated almost all the time. The moment developers commit code, automated systems can start executing all the necessary tasks.

Instead of waiting for anyone to manually activate every step, everything occurs automatically. You then end up with a build process that isn’t only faster but more consistent, too!

What About Continuous Integration?

Continuous integration is also known as CI, and it represents the cornerstone of DevOps. Instead of waiting forever (up to several weeks) before merging everybody’s work together, developers are able to integrate changes multiple times during the day.

Every single update triggers an automated build along with a number of different tests. If by any chance something breaks, it’s discovered in a flash, meaning that you do not need to wait for days, which is certainly a much worse alternative.

This approach significantly decreases debugging time because developers know exactly which change was the main culprit. Smaller updates make software builds far more predictable, minimizing the risk of gargantuan integration headaches before release.

Moving On To Infrastructure

Modern DevOps highlights infrastructure as code. Instead of manually configuring servers, environments are defined through version-controlled configuration files. This means that development, staging, testing, and production environments can be made consistently.

When each environment is practically identical, then the widely known “it works on my machine” issue becomes far less common, which is a great thing, for sure. In these circumstances, teams no longer spend too much time diagnosing environment-related problems because they are far more focused on delivering working software.

As you can see, transitioning to DevOps isn’t solely about speeding up software builds. It’s also about choosing a much wiser way of working where collaboration, automation, and shared responsibility become an integral part of everyday development.