DevOps: Tapping into the best of both worlds to improve applications
When businesses build custom applications, they want to do the job as quickly and efficiently as possible without skimping on quality. That is what DevOps is all about - developers and operations collaborating to build applications together, streamlining processes like planning, development, and testing. With DevOps, teams can build better quality applications faster with fewer errors by building and testing apps incrementally throughout the process.
Today, enterprises are pushing toward digital transformation by adopting both established strategies, like hybrid cloud, and emerging technologies like generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). This makes it critical to implement best practices like DevOps to maximize the business impact of digital transformation, hybrid cloud, GenAI, and other IT initiatives. Organizations depend on DevOps solutions that can leverage the benefits of hybrid cloud infrastructure so DevOps teams can collaborate in real-time, scale at their own pace, work from anywhere, keep sensitive data secure, and more. They also need a solid foundation of automation via DevOps to enable best practices including continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) across multi-code environments to get work done.
Let’s dive into how organizations can leverage DevOps in a hybrid environment to tap into the best of both core systems and cloud.
How a Hybrid Approach Better Supports DevOps
When it comes to building applications and collaborating across functions, a hybrid environment greatly benefits DevOps. The cloud offers mobility and easy distribution of information. Developers and testers can work from anywhere and collaborate on applications in real-time.
The cloud is also ideal for software testing, especially in highly regulated industries that must ensure new software doesn’t disrupt an existing IT environment. Cloud-based testing is faster than traditional testing, after all, because it circumvents the need for many IT management tasks. The speed with which you can build a testing environment can lead to faster time to market and easier customization. Plus, a variety of testing environments can often be simulated.
Another great benefit of the cloud is it is easily scalable, so organizations can do so at their own pace without the need for additional hardware. The total cost of ownership of cloud infrastructure is more cost-effective than on-premises since there isn’t an upfront cost for equipment and maintenance is less expensive. Additionally, the ease of collaboration and scalability leads to more efficient productivity, which results in faster and higher-quality application delivery. These benefits of the cloud are a huge win for DevOps.
However, the purpose of building applications in a hybrid environment is to leverage the benefits of both the cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Moving to the cloud does not mean everything goes to the cloud. Enterprises can take a blended and balanced approach and reap the benefits of each when it makes sense. An on-premises data center offers high processing power for more complex workloads in addition to strong security benefits, which is great for organizations following strict regulations and handling sensitive data. This is not to say that cloud-based environments are unsecure – there are many modern cloud solutions with extensive security protections – but IT teams in an on-premises environment have fewer endpoints to manage and can host all sensitive data in secure core systems. On top of that, an on-premises environment is less likely to have lag or latency issues, which means fewer disruptions while developers and testers work on applications.
In a hybrid cloud environment, enterprises get the benefits of both – allowing developers to collaborate and access information via the cloud, but store more sensitive information in secure systems when it makes sense.
Getting the Best of Both Worlds
The way to tap into the benefits of both sides of the coin is through modern DevOps solutions.
Rocket Software’s DevOps platform, Rocket DevOps, is compatible with hybrid-cloud environments and multiple public clouds, which allow organizations to modernize at their own pace and scale up when ready. The mobility aspect of cloud-based solutions allows developers and testers to work on applications from anywhere and get work done in the modern workplace.
At the same time, a hybrid-cloud environment enables IT teams to keep sensitive data in core systems if needed and deploy less sensitive data and applications to developers and testers via the cloud. Rocket DevOps also allows enterprises to implement CI/CD for developers and IT teams to refine and test user experiences, technologies, and experiment ideas for continuous innovation in multi-code environments. The solution also offers automation capabilities for repetitive tasks, so developers can focus on more complex and strategic processes. This leads to more efficient application development for better results and faster deployment with less error-prone manual workflows.
For IT teams, Rocket DevOps reduces the stress of security and regulations by streamlining compliance requirements through pre-packaged templates, permissions/controls, and automation capabilities. For example, team members can customize dashboard elements developers have access to including quality assurance, management, and more.
When it comes to building applications across functions, IT decision makers need to choose what is the best option for them, but with a hybrid-cloud approach to DevOps they can get the best of both worlds.
To learn more about IT modernization, visit the Rocket Software Let’s Modernize page.
