The simplification of technologies, the abundance of choice and the ease of getting started make cloud technologies really easy to move to. In particular, moving infrastructure to a cloud environment and making use of platform as a service solutions like OpenShift, Cloud Foundry or Heroku really escalates the speed of development for developers and in turn saves lots of time and costs upfront. What happens next is what blows out your costs and impacts your profitability. Interested to know what this is? – then read on.
Developers start to focus on production issues, try to fix traditional infrastructure problems, open security holes and lose time on new development to work on support. Developers start to get woken up in the middle of the night to fix issues and come into work annoyed, late and un-productive. Budgets start to blow out and the company culture gets really ugly.
Your business application starts to suffer, slow down and constantly be out of action, reducing your ability to be productive and impacts profit. The reputation of the application starts to drop and users view the application in a negative mindset. The up hill battle of improving the reputation starts. Your forecasts start to look like they are way off target and you start to panic.
“Budgets start to blow out and the company culture gets really ugly”
At this point, directors and managers start to lose sleep, wondering how things can be improved, how to improve the culture and how to re-invigorate the applications reputation in the market place. The features you wanted to release are not getting done and the company starts to feel overwhelmed with tasks and issues that you just want to disappear.
You realise that you have a gap, a big one too. You need someone to just fix the issues, plug any holes in the environment and make things work well. Your developers do not have the right skills to do this and so you look at hiring a support resource. Great! so you look in the market for a support resource. You may find one that is good, really good, and gets cracking fast, but they need to work on issues late at night, be in the office to fix other issues during the day and even add some enhancements. They too get tired and frustrated, working long hours and start to fall behind on the tasks at hand. The loop starts over again.
Alternatively, you look at getting support from an outside company. One that focuses on supporting Cloud infrastructure, security and performance. Again this is great and you have a team of resources that can manage the environment but still leaves a gap. The gap in this case is the final area of cross developer-infrastructure resources. People that automate and control your release processes and provide architecture assistance as well as ongoing support. We typically call this DevOps. You need the infrastructure group to create the scripts, understand code and make changes based on your architecture needs. So how do you fill this gap?
“DevOps teams provide the communication between developers and infrastructure people”
Find a company that can do the infrastructure build, provide support and integrate nicely with your developers. This will eliminate the gaps in supporting your applications, build the confidence in your developers to stop worrying about the infrastructure and get the reassurance that issues will be dealt with by the right people all the time, and improved on.
DevOps teams provide the communication between developers and infrastructure people, ensure quality assurance is in place and assist in rapid development and release processes. In essence, solving the communication between the parties involved will produce a better result for your business.