DevOps for Start-ups - Top #6 Technical Considerations for Successful Implementation DevOps is the new way of infusing life in your product, revolutionizing the way it is built
By Narinder Kumar •
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We live in an era of start-ups, where young entrepreneurs, who are born in the digital age, have caused most of the age-old businesses to rethink their business models. The new-age start-ups live and thrive on digital disruption.
They embrace emerging technologies and follow agile and lean methodologies for iterative development. Many newcomers have shown remarkable success with their innovative digital products that address real life challenges.
However, the start-ups anatomy is such they have to function with optimized resources be it people, time, or money. In such a challenging situation, it becomes highly critical to maintain low infrastructure costs and yet improve business agility.
Typically, it's a common trend for a start-up to begin with building a minimum viable product to represent its innovation.
Further, businesses can improve their products on the basis of stakeholder or user feedback. Many a times, this requires multiple-code commits or releases in a day. This is where DevOps comes to the rescue!
DevOps helps businesses improve the relationship between Development and Operations team by making them more collaborative, synchronized and agile. Combining DevOps with Cloud technology has revolutionized the way products are built. It has helped businesses keep up with rapidly changing market demands.
Further, DevOps can help automate the entire delivery pipeline, making it simple for teams to deploy multiple-code changes, keeping the code in releasable state always. A start-up should adopt DevOps in the early development phase.
Here are 6 important technical considerations to keep in mind while implementing DevOps in a Start-up Culture.
1.Automation
Given the start-up anatomy, automation is crucial. It not only helps reduce redundant processes, but also reduces human efforts required in the compilation of code, testing, QA, monitoring and reporting etc. While automation can be extremely helpful, overdoing it by using too many automation tools can lead unexpected outcomes. Hence, a careful evaluation of the entire product lifecycle should be taken into consideration.
2. "Dockerization'
To keep pace with consumer expectations, start-ups demand agile, flexible, scalable and consistent environments for their applications. Hence, they need a lightweight and portable infrastructure that is also cost effective. Docker technology has gained a lot of popularity recently. Docker container is typically a software development platform that packages applications in containers allowing them to be portable. It is an open source software bucket that contains everything needed to run the software component independently. It can also be thought of as another form of virtualization that is extremely lightweight and can run multiple containers simultaneously.
3. Optimizing Server Utilization
One of the major focus areas in a start-up is to keep the infrastructure costs at minimum and over-provisioning or under-provisioning of infrastructure can be a costly cloud computing mistake that start-ups can make. Instead, start-ups should smartly provision as per average consumption and opt at spinning up infrastructure as and when needed.
4. Continuous Availability
DevOps provisions for Continuous Integration and Continuous Development help improve the code quality, further automating the delivery pipeline. This keeps the code in a releasable state always and drastically reduces the release cycle time, enabling faster time to market. This helps to ensure start-ups to incorporate product changes faster in order to stay ahead of competition.
5. Continuous Monitoring
For a start-up, a website or an application going down can cost a lot of money. Start-ups should look at using DevOps tools that can help identify performance issues, security loopholes, or any other probable risks that can hamper their growth. These tools can work both in proactive and reactive modes and can provide continuous visibility of resources state to take corrective actions.
6. Portability
Start-ups are dynamic, they are known for frequent changes in almost everything. To maintain the dynamic state, start-ups should consider building the product in such a way that it allows for portability. Consider a case where a start-up has to migrate workloads to a more robust and fault tolerant platform due to performance issues, such as moving to a different cloud server altogether. Hence, while building the product and its infrastructure, start-ups should take portability into consideration.
Being a start-up you only get one shot to win your customers' heart and any failure can cost heavily causing them to go back to the drawing board all over again. DevOps is the new way of infusing life in your product and it has brought a revolutionizing cultural change in the way development and operations teams collaborate. It is certainly a key enabler for start-ups, provided they take into account the technical considerations for leveraging it in an optimum way.
