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AppOps: A New Buzzword or a Revolution in DevOps?

By Innominds,

AppOps

DevOps is a growing field in the IT world today. DevOps helps the IT infrastructure become adept and respond quickly to the changing demands of the fast-paced world. The idea of DevOps revolutionized the application delivery pipelines for a lot of organizations. But there are a lot of organizations that are still struggling through their DevOps journey. According to a study, over 50% of the organizations globally are either trying to figure out their DevOps strategy or are stuck trying to build an optimal DevOps pipeline. While half the world is in the process of adopting DevOps, there is already a new player in town — AppOps.

There are multiple Ops terms out there today and it is normal to be overwhelmed by those. In 2021, AppOps has been the new buzzword. But AppOps is not just a buzzword that will create some hype for a while and disappear. It is, in fact, a solution to the world’s DevOps woes.

It’s not that with the arrival of AppOps, DevOps will become a thing of the past. Instead, AppOps is an enabler of DevOps. AppOps eliminates the rigidity and clunkiness of DevOps systems and thus, allowing teams to be more productive and self-sufficient.

In order to understand why AppOps has become so huge, let’s take a look at DevOps first.

The focus on the Ops

In the present day world, any application that is being built and deployed would require a DevOps setup. Developers and IT teams need the right infrastructure and a proper DevOps process set up to be able to build, deploy and maintain an application. Teams usually try to fill in gaps in the pipeline and keep reiterating their processes until it reaches a state of perfection or the IT team is just busy putting out fires all day long and keeping the whole system from falling apart. All the lags in the CI/CD process are paid for by the organization in terms of downtimes which directly translates to business continuity.

Amid all this chaos, investors and teams alike, wonder whether DevOps is worth all the time, money, and effort? The answer has to be evident to all by now — of course, yes! However bad your chaos looks at the present, it would be a lot worse without DevOps. Remember how it used to take weeks to just get a server provisioned and how the IT teams and developer teams constantly kept throwing things over the wall? Remember how much back and forth and running around it took to get a small change done in the application? Yes, those were the pre-DevOps times.

DevOps

Let’s look at it this way — DevOps is a way to make processes efficient and eliminate all the back and forth between the teams. So, the focus here is mainly on the operational side of things. The DevOps teams adopt tools to automate provisioning for infrastructure and services to eliminate all the bottlenecks during the deployment process. They build new pipelines and security controls based on where the applications are to be deployed. This works fine for a while but with time, there are too many tools, creating disunity in application controls and thereby, negating the very purpose of actually having those tools.
People vs tools

This is an age-old conundrum. To bring order to all the chaos, tools and processes are added to the mix and then teams have to put in efforts to get adapted to those tools. With time, there are too many tools and thus, come in more people to manage the tools and again too many people create chaos and again more tools come in… so on and so forth — it’s a vicious cycle that goes on and on. This is a rabbit hole a lot of organizations get stuck in while implementing DevOps.

DevOps is a wonderful concept that manages to streamline people and processes.

This usually happens due to the complexities of all modern technologies and tools that are used for development and deployment. Present-day infrastructures are complex and there is a huge learning curve involved. So, both the developers and IT teams have completely different skill sets that do not intersect. Most organizations try to bridge this gap and keep up with this complexity by throwing expensive tools and resources at it. They even set up a separate DevOps team just to build internal developer enablement platforms. These platforms intend to abstract the infrastructure and empower developers to deploy and support applications all by themselves without having to wait around for the availability of the IT team. This idea of self-service DevOps for developers sounds appealing in theory. In practice, however, a developer dashboard does not solve the underlying complexity of the system. These platforms can serve teams well for a year or two as long as the deployment pipeline pretty much remains the same. But sooner or later, they are left to rot after years of investment due to regular downtime and insufficient security.

All of this sounds extremely relatable, doesn’t it?

Then what’s the solution? Should we all collectively give up on implementing DevOps?

Well, not. The benefits of DevOps are very evident and it is impossible to have a modern infrastructure with a DevOps CI/CD pipeline in place.

So, what should we do?

Let’s consider a different approach to DevOps. An approach that focuses on the application layer itself — a common application operating model.

Enter: AppOps

DevOps is an ideology that brings people, processes, culture, and tools together. But more often than not, tools are not given their due importance while implementing the DevOps pipeline. This is because when DevOps evolved initially, the technology that can automate and sustain the DevOps pipeline hadn’t evolved yet. This was the time when containers, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructures were just starting to gain popularity. So, when early boomers implemented DevOps, they focused mainly on optimizing their processes and culture. Tools ended up becoming an add-on to the system. Ideally, tools need to be the binding force that brings people, culture, and processes together.

This is where AppOps come in. AppOps is like a sub-section of the versatile DevOps methodology. It focuses on implementing the right tools to sustain the complexities of your infrastructure.

AppOps offers the tools to build a universal operating model for all types of deployments and eliminates the wall of confusion between the developer and IT teams. This way, you can enable self-service of application management and operations for developers in its true sense. The IT operations team can build the guardrails within which developers can operate. The developers become the true owners of the applications that they build. This will streamline application analysis, deployment, and management.

With AppOps in place, the DevOps team can oversee app delivery and management while not having to constantly put out fires all day long. They can directly implement the ‘operate what you build’ pipeline for all the applications by enabling developers to build, deploy, and test their applications without any help. The DevOps teams can utilize their time on larger concerns of cloud infrastructure management, cost optimization, and cloud cluster deployments. They can further focus on an initiative like optimizing the stability, cost, and security of applications deployed on their cloud.

The AppOps methodology is based on providing the right tools that bind people and processes together and help them collaborate efficiently and effectively.

Takeaway

Just like we upgrade our phones every few years to keep up with emerging technologies, DevOps has to be upgraded too. AppOps is the upgrade we need for our DevOps systems. AppOps brings flexibility to a clunky traditional DevOps system and lets teams are more self-sufficient and more productive. In conclusion, AppOps is the much-needed revolution in DevOps.

With meticulous and well-thought-out planning and implementation, Innominds has a unique way of assisting our customers in filling into the most advanced DevOps models. With performance increases, beneficial resource allocation, professional guidance, and strategic execution, the DevOps ecosystem will drive changes from a granular level and above. Follow us as we create a master plan and ensure that we take complete control of the situation using our in-house DevOps as a Service concept.

Our team of Cloud and DevOps boast of past achievements in catapulting organizations into service upgrades, and rapid developments. The Cloud and DevOps integration will ensue implementations of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), migrations from any type of cloud architecture, or cloud service provider, optimizations of the speed and cost of deployments, Automations, and DevSecOps.

 

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Topics: Cloud & DevOps

Innominds

Innominds

Innominds is an AI-first, platform-led digital transformation and full cycle product engineering services company headquartered in San Jose, CA. Innominds powers the Digital Next initiatives of global enterprises, software product companies, OEMs and ODMs with integrated expertise in devices & embedded engineering, software apps & product engineering, analytics & data engineering, quality engineering, and cloud & devops, security. It works with ISVs to build next-generation products, SaaSify, transform total experience, and add cognitive analytics to applications.

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