Dispersed workforces. Overburdened DevOps personnel. Limited resources. 

Developing applications at scale and bringing them to market on time is becoming increasingly challenging. Yet, corporate demands persist. There’s too much at stake to risk delays:

Cost overruns. Waning customer loyalties. The list goes on.

Developers prefer to spend their timing writing and shipping code, yet the numbers tell a different story: Each developer spends more than 15 hours weekly on anything but writing and shipping code, a productivity lapse that costs U.S. companies more than $61 billion each.

It’s not a matter of commitment. Accelerating DevOps Processes While Keeping Your Developers Happywith the skills are sharply in demand, pulling their attention in myriad directions, often to the detriment of the enterprise. And that’s a trend that’s not expected to ebb any time soon with Quali.

You can hire more DevOps folks, sure. But at what cost? And, perhaps more important, is just adding more bodies really going to change anything? With legacy systems and processes deeply entrenched, productivity and efficiency remain aspirational at best. At some point, you’re merely plugging your finger in the proverbial dike, a relentless onslaught of lost time, lost money, lost patience, and let’s face it—lost customers.

Your challenge #1: 

Deliver relevant and effective infrastructure offerings

In an effort to please everyone, traditional cloud and DevOps teams often provide just basic infrastructure offerings. Sometimes, these offerings are meant to be a starting point—a building block that’s supposed to evolve (but never does). Other times, in the interest of being able to deliver something, it gets scoped down. Either way, the end result is the same: an offering that’s so minimal in scope and characteristics that it fails to meet anyone’s genuine needs (let alone meet production demands, which is the overarching goal).

As a result, the traditional offering is best characterized by its shortcomings:

  • It fails to enhance developer productivity
  • It fails to improve the user experience
  • It fails to tie to the application’s ability to achieve its business objectives
  • It fails to be cost-effective

The end results are predictable: Even though someone maintains that they’ve deployed a self-service, automated solution offering cloud resources, the warning signs are dire: Delivery times remain stagnant. Meanwhile, request volume remains high, and there’s little, if any, reduction in rework.

The Solution:

Involve the developer from the beginning to optimize offerings

Define your infrastructure requirements based on direct feedback from your developers. The effort is critical, as it’s far more productive to allocate effort into procuring useful resources that deliver on their intended value.

It can be challenging to parse through what someone thinks they need and understand what they actually need, so you must be prepared to deploy multiple feedback mechanisms to extract the actionable details.

Ensure that the solution’s intended business impact connects explicitly to the applications involved and that the offering adds value to the developer, either in terms of productivity or overall user experience.

You should build, deliver, and manage a purposeful environment that serves an application and its needs, which includes the teams building and delivering that application. Within that environment, Developers are include application logic and everything else that an application needs to actually run.

Finally, be prepared to evolve your offering over time to make it useful. Supply and demand changes are continually in flux; the nimble organization must be able to accommodate and respond to those changes with appropriate software and infrastructure environment changes, as needed.

Your challenge #2:

Maintain control while venturing outside of your on-prem comfort zone

Change is difficult. Adapting to change—even more so. But sticking with the status quo can be limiting, especially as the marketplace continues to change at a rapid pace.

When it comes to shifting infrastructure operations from on-prem to the cloud, for instance, there’s hesitancy. Not only is on-prem infrastructure more familiar, but it’s more secure.

Or is it?

As businesses’ configurations continue to evolve, there remain pockets of people that hold tight to the assumption that on-prem equates to more robust governance and security. However, that inflexible mindset can blind you to solutions that are more powerful and efficient.

If you find that you are constantly defining solutions in an on-prem scenario, consider your last several offerings: How many of those started from a public cloud or SaaS set of resources? No doubt, all included at least one as an option.

Just because your organization has yet to take advantage of new technologies doesn’t mean the technology doesn’t exist. With the cloud journey now more than a decade old, chances are that a compelling technology exists—one that your competitors have already adopted— that meets or exceeds your company’s similar security requirements.

To read full download the whitepaper:

Accelerating DevOps Processes While Keeping Your Developers Happy

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