Devops, Digital Adoption and Why Design is Critical

Understanding devops and the digital benefits and risks of a digital presence is nowadays a requirement to avoid ill informed decisions with long reaching consequences. It’s hard to believe the changes going on in the world over the last 2 years due to COVID and the horrors it inflicted on so many. The IMF on their website noted real GDP contracting 3.3% globally in 2020 from 2.8% growth in 2019. The ‘post vaccination’ real GDP rebound is reported at 6% in 2021 and the year is not ended. Our struggle against COVID has not only created a digital explosion that moved folks online, it has created a digital e-commerce boon for those businesses who adapted and moved their business in part or in full to the online digital space. Devops will help you make a winning approach no matter what path you chose.

Devops, Digital Adoption and Why Design is Critical

“On Prem V Cloud Infrastructure” Cloud infrastructure wins hands down on reliability, availability, along with a huge array of design options that ‘On Prem’ cannot compete with. You should shop around before selecting the best in class for your needs and not just go with “the best”. For example, I selected a shared hosting plan with a hosting provider for my site https://maolte.ie accepting that its limitations do not infringe on my basic requirements starting out; rather then engage a leading cloud provider for times x cost. Cloud’s subscription cost model extends the online reach for business with a lower cost tolerance as no CAPEX is required to get set up online, just a cloud provider account, and some good old Devops knowhow.

“Start with the End in Mind” When designing your Online technology solution, don’t become victims of your own success. Factor in scalability noting for example, are you moving from ‘On Prem’ to the cloud to scale in a cost effective manner? If so, a ‘Lift & Shift’ approach whilst easiest is often not the best as the application layer is often tailored for local ‘On Prem’ infrastructure. This is practically guaranteed to be incompatible with cloud native products. Cloud native products substantially improve availability, speed of deployment and resiliency. The ability to scale, recover from online asset destruction and other contingencies is substantially improved with cloud native product adoption and will scale much better when compared with a ‘Lift & Shift’ approach. Major cloud vendors are also making it easier to migrate to a competitor easing the threat of ‘vendor lock in’.

“Automation is Power” The use of CI/CD pipelines is a key Devops area benefit that makes code sharing via Artifactories like JFrog a routine feature in a pipeline. Embracing cloud native products increases design options like AWS CodeStar and Azure Devops, which I can advise are viable tools for a streamlined CI/CD application pipeline. Also, note that Jenkins may not suit your use case, no matter how many of us Devops Engineers love it. Research a good fit for your use case bearing current deployment timing requirements, expansion requirements (e.g. artifactory capabilities, supported programming languages, speed of deployment, testing suites and tools) and scalability capabilities.

The thought of been able to enact security and code scanning intra deployment after the development team has signed off on their code and catch critical issues is now here via the Devops model. This knowhow will not only save money over time, the tribal knowledge base will build increasing capacity and ultimately the success of your business.

I am a Freelance Writer with 5+ years experience, Infrastructure & Devops Engineer with 3+ years experience. In addition to been available for full time work in these areas, I trade as a Freelancer under the ‘Maolte’ brand. If you would like to know more, drop me a line at john@maolte.ie, twitter @johnmlhll or visit me at John Mulhall T/a Maolte

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