Application support: Role of DevOps
Application Support ?
It is a service that ensures that the various applications and services in the business run smoothly without any disruptions. Even if some disruptions were to be experienced, application support should ensure timely rectification of such issues. Application support is often correlated with technical support that ensures the applications can run without any issues. A good approach to application support will ensure timely restoration of services with minimum downtime, quick troubleshooting, and fast resolution of any technical glitches.
DevOps Explained
DevOps is; not a tool, not a technology, not a process. It is in fact a combination of all these along with the people. So in totality, it can be perceived as a culture that demands all these components. It emphasizes integrating the processes and functionalities between development and operations teams.
A survey by Harvard Business Review has revealed that about 86 percent of the respondents consider it important for them to build and deploy their software quickly. A successful approach to DevOps strategy ensures that a business is able to market its applications at a faster rate.
Role of DevOps in Application Support
1) Measurement of Indicators
In order to have a successful approach to application support, it is important to keep track of some key metrics. For instance, there may be some glitches and errors that might need immediate attention from the teams. A DevOps strategy in place enables teams to easily monitor parameters like mean time to recovery (MTTR) which is a measure of the time taken to recover from failures.
A successful DevOps culture also ensures faster recovery from such issues thus ensuring that the end-user experience is not affected. DevOps monitoring solutions and tools also help teams to assess how many times an issue gets repeated over and over as well as estimate the costs per such incident.
2) Self Healing
DevOps automation capabilities facilitate an enterprise to leverage self-healing solutions for many repetitive and error-prone processes. Automation can annihilate many manual and mundane tasks. In the current business scenario, it is exceptionally important to address the shortcomings in the application; glitches, errors, and other anomalies before the application reaches the hands of end-users.
DevOps monitoring tools enable developers to anticipate the problems beforehand and solve them. A resilient and self-healing system drives better innovations that are in line with the drastic changes in the business. DevOps can thus enable an enterprise to acquire better flexibility and responsiveness.
3) Easy Debugging
Unlike the yesteryear application development, the present business landscape demands that errors and glitches be addressed as early as possible. In a production environment that has become largely driven by multiple deployments, errors can take a huge toll on the productivity and the quality of applications.
The deployment of DevOps automation tools enables teams to get around the complexities associated with manual processes and errors. DevOps monitoring tools help teams to monitor the issues related to applications and get insights into the working of applications and address the issues in a time-bound manner.
4) Automation
Automation is the process that involves the use of technologies to execute various activities that may otherwise require extensive human intervention and labor. Automation can be used for a variety of operations in the business landscape like release management, change management, configuration management, etc helps an enterprise to quickly sort out any issues in its product and accelerate its release to the production environment.
5) Change Management
Change management is defined as the process and methods by which an organization implements the changes within its external and internal processes. It is a collective term that includes all methods and approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change.
Change management is a part of application maintenance that involves managing and tracking changes and code requirements. A successful change management strategy can enable an enterprise to ensure faster release by fostering cross-team collaboration. DevOps culture emphasizes realigning the organizational culture by establishing and fostering a governance structure that helps an enterprise to easily keep track of the changes and facilitate teams to act collectively on it.
6) Tapping New Potential
Developing new capabilities and features to deliver better value to the products as well as ensuring that the existing features are easily exploitable is one of the core functionalities of application support. DevOps culture serves as the gateway to exploit new generation digital technologies that help a business to incorporate the latest features in its products. This apart from offering the best class experience to the user also helps an enterprise to make the available features more simplistic and intriguing for the end-user.
Conclusion
A well-adopted DevOps strategy is one of the prerequisites to guaranteeing a successful application support strategy as well as its efficiency. In a business landscape where applications are to be delivered as quickly as possible and errors and other glitches to be resolved with minimum downtime, DevOps serves as the cornerstone that helps a business address a wide-ranging array of issues and needs.
For organizations that are looking to transit to a DevOps culture, Activelobby provides DevOps consulting services. We implement some of the best DevOps practices that ensure the timely delivery of your applications. We can help you in implementing your application strategies by using the best combination of technology and practices.
