[Blog] DevOps: A Philosophy for Rapid Progress
In the day and age of reaping results immediately, one set of practices
that can be followed to achieve that effectively on a broad scale can DevOps. The lingo stands
for nothing but Development Operations.
The philosophy behind
it could be thought as to fail fast and fail small. And this is a very
cost effective way to run any form of operations. This is in stark
contrast to the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen- continuous, paced
improvement. Where Kaizen could be thought of as a life lesson, it might
not work for businesses in today's circumstances. In this day and age
of delivering an usable product or service on time could mean life or
death for a business.
In that train of thoughts, the ideology
of DevOps is not just to fail small, but to be able to immediately
rectify the failure and move forward immediately. It is a perfect
amalgamation of Development and Implementing the same through IT
Operations. And as soon as a failure or point of improvement is found,
development takes over immediately to rectify or add a feature.
The primary activities also called as tool trains are Planning,
Building, Testing, Packaging and Releasing, and lastly Monitoring. This
process repeats in itself as long as needed to get the desired output.
Think
about most super successful online services that are available right
now. Be it a sales platform or a social media platform. They all started
off as a prototype that got catapulted into the public's view. And then
through continuous, rapid development and implementation they got to
what they are today.
With these incremental changes, we often
have no recollection of what the platforms looked like when they
started. And all we know and see right now is the current success.
Importantly,
like all ideas, the concept is only as powerful as we can track the
activities and make analytical observations which can then be improved
upon. If I was to apply DevOps for my own personal project, a pen and
paper would suffice. However, when multiple people are involved from
multiple verticals and locations - a digital system, like ServiceDesk Plus, to track, monitor
and view all the activities are extremely important.
This can
be achieved using our own faith full ServiceDesk Plus through various
methods as per your needs and requirements. We will discuss the steps to
do so itself in a different post that will be back linked here once
done, so do follow us with a keen eye to hear more about how to make
your life and business more efficient.
In current standards,
the concept of DevOps has further evolved into many smaller practices
for various fields. However, in my heart and mind, DevOps has a special
place for initiating philosophy. The ServiceDesk Plus tool being a
versatile and customizable platform allows you to structure the
workflows however you want to accommodate your needs. We will discuss
more about that in our future post.