Organizations around the world are adopting the DevOps culture to meet the demand for continually improving software and services. Each DevOps team is different in terms of structure, policies, skills, and capabilities. But regardless of the composition and skills of the individual team members, a good DevOps platform will help guide a team to success.
All great DevOps platforms have three characteristics below in common:
- Support for different cloud environments. Many organizations use both multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments. While they might seem similar at first glance, they are different in several ways. Multi-cloud uses more than one cloud providers in a single network architecture. Hybrid cloud, on the other hand, uses both on-site and off-site IT resources. Each environment has its own set of advantages, which includes high availability for multi-cloud and flexibility for hybrid cloud. The challenge for the DevOps team is to choose a platform that supports both environments.
- Support for automation. One of the ingredients for a functional DevOps organization is support for automation. It standardizes production platforms, reduces manual tasks, and increases development and testing speed. By reducing the amount of human involvement in the development and deployment process, a DevOps team can reduce the number of human errors. Automation also frees up team members and allows them to take on tasks that actually require human intervention.
- Robust communities.DevOps teams do not exist in a vacuum. Despite the positive effects of DevOps, such as agility and speed, many organizations still resist the change in culture that comes with it, especially those with IT operations that work in silos. This is where communities come in. They provide valuable moral and technical support to DevOps teams that are just starting out, act as repositories of best practices, and act as consumer advocates for DevOps platforms.