The world of software development underwent a major change with the emergence of DevOps in 2008. This led to a fundamental shift in focus in the company’s culture, organizational principles, and approach to development and operations. With the adoption of DevOps, companies broke the ‘us and theirs’ mindset and created a closer collaboration between teams.
Many companies founded at least two decades ago traversed their way through anarchy, waterfall development and agile principles, and today 80% of them strive to implement DevOps best practices. For startups, the situation looks like a win as they can implement it from the beginning and avoid mistakes made by someone else.
So let’s find out how DevOps can be ready to lend a hand for start-ups wishing to turn into unicorns!
DevOps benefits for startups– Start-ups have to distribute their products very quickly or it can take place to be too late – someone will do it in its place. That’s why development and delivery processes must be continuous. This approach to development ensures non-stop features release and product step up.
Among others, the main advantages of cultivating DevOps from day one are:
• Automation– Let your developers focus on product improvement rather than its maintenance. Statistics show that companies that use DevOps methodology properly benefit from automating 95% of routine manual tasks and 21% less time spent on debugging and unscheduled tasks. Thus, they have about 30% more time for new tasks on the planned deadline.
• Increased availability (up to 99 %!)– Following the above point, automation almost always helps in getting the service available. This becomes possible thanks to 1) reduction in errors caused by manual; 2) automated testing before deployment; 3) More reliable equipment and services.
• Faster Deployment– Time is the highest value for startup. Deploy up to 70% faster than your competitors!
• Better communication among teams– In fact, a lion’s share of success is the great communication of the various teams – from devs to QA. Team members interact more actively with each other and solve challenges encountered during operation. Higher quality
Top quality of the delivered product is achieved by continuously implementing automated testing, log management, monitoring and CI/CD pipelines. They enable us to eliminate critical bugs in production and improve performance metrics.
• Customer-centric production– The purpose of implementation of any DevOps practice is to increase response time and CD principles are based on customer needs and their behavior while using your service.
Tips and best practices for successful startups- The modern tech stack allows startups to enjoy the benefits mentioned above, but proper setup and usage is a must. Otherwise, you will lose time and be vulnerable to technical debt (we will discuss this later). So let’s consider what you need to embrace DevOps for your further success.
Well-architected infrastructure in the cloud- Public cloud providers such as AWS, GCP, and Azure provide a wide range of services that help build a robust infrastructure in the cloud. This is why companies that quickly adopt cloud computing have the opportunity to utilize all the advantages of HPC, micro services, server less computing, CI/CD – the need for DevOps best practices to build a well-architected infrastructure. it occurs.
You can refer to the AWS guide, where they provide a detailed description of the concept of well structured frameworks. This concept allows developers to build a reliable, secure and highly efficient infrastructure for their software/application. In a nutshell, this concept consists of an optimization strategy of 5 key points to excel:
• Business Process– It deals with automation, daily operations management and disaster recovery scenarios. Without proper business processes in place, there is a high chance of stumbling upon the pitfalls of a poorly developed infrastructure, even if you have a team of top developers. This is because of poor communication and lack of strategy planning in case something goes wrong. So task #1 is to optimize business processes.
• Security– This theory focuses on data security and privacy, user role management, and signaling. Security is the most important thing when developing architecture from scratch.
• Sustainability– This concept helps in preventing failures and, if any, in a faster recovery from a disaster. If you follow the advice, you get 99% service availability and happy customers.
• High performance– This framework provides tips on how to use your IT resources wisely. It mostly deals with the issues of how to select the right technology stack, calculate workload, monitor efficiency and make data-driven decisions.
• Cost of the infrastructure maintenance– The most important part for a newly established company is to learn how to analyze your spending over time and plan a budget.
Well structured is not only an approach to development, it is also about optimizing business processes. That’s why you need a team lead or CTO. It is important to have a professional with relevant experience and knowledge, who will understand the platform and take responsibility for decision making on its technology stack and communication with stakeholders (or business executives).
