How to Understand Your Company Needs a Devops Engineer
Every IT company knows how challenging it can be to manage all the development processes and perform quality software solutions. Organizations often come face-to-face with such challenges as high development cost, long release cycle, or low quality of products. There can be many ways to solve such problems, but one of the most effective is to hire a DevOps engineer. It can be one person or a team (depending on the size of your business) who helps you release software updates more efficiently, automate a set of processes and prove that different stands of development and IT functions work better together.
In the following paragraphs, we will discuss the biggest challenges for companies and how they could be solved with DevOps engineering. You will also learn more about skills required for DevOps efficient work and the best solutions for complicated issues.
1. The Productivity of the Teams is Too Low
It is always a problem if you spend a lot of time on product delivery but don’t get the expected result. The developer team often waits for the operations team to build a proper production environment, and QA teams often wait for developers to start testing the product. All those operations take time but do not transform into product quality. Increasing productivity has become one of the biggest challenges for many companies. When a team spends much time waiting, it reduces the productivity level for all the company. At the same time, you can change the situation with DevOps.
As we mentioned, one of the essential roles of a DevOps engineer is to automate processes. DevOps principles ensure time optimization, continuous and collaborative process of product development.
2. Time to Market is Too Long
Another challenge for developers is to bring its product to customers as fast as possible. Customers’ demand and capturing new markets force the time of delivering new products. It became a massive pressure for the companies, as they often sacrifice the products’ quality to ensure it-time release.
This pressure also made the software lifecycle more complicated and created new constraints. To solve this problem, you need to implicate DevOps engineer skills in reducing the product delivery time by optimizing new workflow. The most efficient way to accelerate time to market is to ensure end-to-to-end automation. DevOps ensure frequent and smaller deployment to production, increase the pace of releases, and inflame continuous integration and software delivery.
3. Problem with Creating a Proper Environment
Another problem you can face is creating the right environment for product development. For many companies, it’s challenging to make any configuration, database, or other changes to the production environment, as they do it manually on the servers. As a result, preparation of the environment for release will take much time. Manual work with environmental issues is a cause of low deployment frequency. Moreover, DevOps required skills ensure optimization of the process and reduce manual operations for effective environment building.
4. The Development Cost is Too High
Even with small and agile development teams, short and efficient project circles, the cost of the final project is not going down. At the same time, there is massive competition in the market, and the company needs to search for new ways of reducing development costs. This is the situation to use DevOps skills of process optimization. DevOps used to be cross-trained across different disciplines, and it means that they can define bugs in the early stages. Also, DevOps engineer can reduce management costs and implement such practices as continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to scale the product. As a result, all those things can reduce general development spending.
5. You Are Not Satisfied With the Quality of the Product
The following important and painful issue in software development is how to increase the quality of the products. It is a huge challenge to build a quality software solution with an expected number of features, and it usually takes time which you do not have. One of the best solutions is to hire DevOps engineer to deal with this problem. First of all, because DevOps will ensure testing at the beginning of each circle. Continuous testing allows QA engineers to be more productive. DevOps also facilitate automated and continuous quality monitoring. Furthermore, they improve building, deployment, test automation, and reporting.
If you found that one or more of those problems is familiar to your company, DevOps engineering can be an excellent solution for them. DevOps roles in software delivery became game-changing. It helps to optimize CI/CD, assess cloud infrastructure and define cost-efficient ways for product development.
Final Thoughts
The DevOps engineer has a unique and essential function in software development. This article focused on explaining what challenges can be performed successfully with such engineers in your team. Probably, your company also faced some of them in practice. We explained how DevOps principles of automation and managing CI/CD pipelines ensure fast and quality product delivery. The article also pointed to the fundamental roles and responsibilities of DevOps engineers to illustrate how those professionals can improve your business flow.
