How DevOps Can Help Startups?

Managing a tech startup has its own challenges. And although we have
come a long way ahead, every new solution seems to build a new
problem. Just take a moment and recall. In the early, 2000’s building
complex applications was not everyone’s piece of cake, and hence the
microservice architecture started becoming popular. But, with time, it
became difficult to deploy these small services of the same application in
different environments, especially as the companies started becoming
serverless with the introduction of cloud computing. Thus, Docker was
built. Everything seemed well, but then came the problem of managing
these large numbers of containers and so container orchestration tools like
Kubernetes started becoming popular.

Every Technology Has Its Baggage

Today the problem is not just technical. With continuous integration &
continuous delivery becoming the key focus as companies try to beat
competitors to market, fast deployment is not just a perk, but a necessity
for young startups to survive. Faster deployment not only saves money,
but even history teaches us that the first to launch has the first influence
on the customers (Just look at how Netflix changed the streaming industry
Although the software tools like Version Control Systems and Virtual
Environments have helped organize production, since the adoption of the
cloud-based microservice architecture, the deployment procedure has
changed a lot. It is no longer new to see applications pass tests in
production and later crash in deployment. Techniques like
IaaC( Infrastructure as a Code ) have helped document the infrastructure
and keep them in sync with the production environment. However, it still
throws light on a lot of areas of improvement, like increased testing times
and the big data logs that have to be gone through.

Now we are at a point where software alone cannot speed up deployment.

The whole system has to change! Though luckily we have the solution:
DevOps.

How does DevOps help you?

The traditional approach to streamlining the production of an application
can be broken into two parts: Development and Operation. The
development includes development, testing, and bug fixes, and although
they are categorized as one unit, in most companies the developers and
testers generally have a communication barrier that leads to more time in
finding and fixing bugs.

When the application is finally approved for deployment, the operations

team is responsible for containerizing individual microservices and
deploying them on the servers. But most startups are serverless these
days and their services are hosted on the cloud. Maintaining the cloud
infrastructure is in itself a time-taking task, and the constant changes in the
development phase result in an increase in the time to market.

This is because Cloud servers have added a lot of tasks to the operations
team. Managing incoming traffic to match the number of servers required
(because now you are paying by the hour), going through logs of crashes,
and reporting these issues to the development are necessary tasks.

Most problems that are faced in this process are generally due to a lack of
communication and data transfer. Either the development team is not
completely aware of the production environment, or the logs of the crashes
and test results are not reported on time.You will also notice that a lot of
time and money can be saved by automating certain processes, like
automatically increasing the server base when traffic is expected to be
high.

DevOps is neither a software stack nor is it some additional hardware for

your server. Instead DevOps is a set of practices and an interdependent
organization structure that is aimed to target several problems that most
tech startups face, by bringing the Dev and the Ops team together.

These problems are:

● Increasing deployment frequency

● Reduce crashes in the deployment phase
● No infrastructure to automate testing
● Faster bug discovery and fixes

In short DevOps aims at better and faster production at a cheaper

price. Now which startup would not want that?
Large companies, like Google, Amazon, and Netflix, were the early
adopters of the DevOps culture. Although it isn’t common to see these
large scale companies adopting new practices, because they have always
been the market disruptors, it was when the stats were compared before
and after the establishment of an in-house DevOpsteam that the benefits
became evident.

The Ending Note

Today, it is advised that startups adopt DevOps practices from the day of
their establishment because it is essential to become used to continuous
integration & continuous delivery to convert clients to customers.
Moreover, if the startup is just too young to afford an in-house DevOps
unit, outsourcing to a third-party DevOps could be the solution. This saves
time and effort on R&D and also the economic costs of implementing any
infrastructure. At the same time, it helps the organization adopt effective
practices that have already been tested by the provider on a large scale
due to their years of experience in the field.