Making Life Easier With DevOps

What Is DevOps Exactly?

Glad you asked. DevOps is the marriage of information technology (IT) and development. It’s a way to turn traditional IT tasks into code, which can then be deployed, versioned, run, and re-run to suit your needs.

…Still a bit fuzzy? Here’s a definition from our friends at Amazon:

“DevOps Model Defined

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.”

The Problem With Snowflakes

Suppose you’re an IT professional tasked with setting up a web server. You follow the project brief to a tee, installing all the necessary software. Then, once you flip the switch, you hold your breath. Why? Because if anything needs to change (and you know for a fact that it will), it could very well break your site. Behold, you’ve just created a snowflake!

Now imagine being able to consider problem servers as ‘throw away.’ When problems arise, no big deal. Within DevOps is the ability to turn files into servers. So you can effectively toss out the old server and make a new one in minutes, maybe even seconds. As configuring servers becomes a thing of the past, developers can get back to what they do best: write code.

A win for production websites is also one for development teams. Today, we can run an exact copy of the production environment on our own computers while we code and test. It’s like troubleshooting before there’s even trouble.

Running With Greater Efficiency

Technologies such as cloud services, application programming interfaces, and a new class of configuration management scripting tools are to thank for the rise of DevOps. For organizations looking to create greater efficiencies and shift their development resources to areas that produce a return on investment, DevOps companies are a dream come true.

If you’re ready to automate away recurring IT headaches, Lelander is versed in some of the most effective DevOps solutions out there. Whether it’s provisioning servers with HashiCorp’s Terraform, writing configuration scripts with Ansible, or deploying containers using Docker, our teams offer a comprehensive suite of DevOps services.

Looking to streamline your enterprise? Our DevOps consulting team will create a solution tuned precisely to your needs. To set up a consultation, call (314) 937-7189, or complete our contact form.