As a startup, the synergy between your software development team and IT operations department is one of the most important keys to growing your business. Establishing solid DevOps practices at the very outset of the startup lifecycle is vital to your long-term success.

When your development and operations teams are working hand-in-hand in an atmosphere focused on continuous improvement, you will deliver a better product in a much shorter time-frame. Plus, when it comes to scaling quickly, having the right DevOps tools in place can separate you from the 90% of startups that fail and put you on the fast track to unicorn status.

At iTechArt, we’ve been helping startups with DevOps for over a decade. In this article, we’ll talk about why DevOps is such an integral part of success and share five essential tools you’ll need to scale your startup.

Let’s get started.

Why startups need good DevOps practices

DevOps is all about efficiency and automation – both of which can save a startup two of its most important assets: time and money. 

According to a recent report by the SANS Institute, high performing DevOps organizations:

• Deploy 200x more often
• Spend 22% less time on unplanned work
• Recover from deployment failures 24x faster
• Spend 29% more time on new work
• Fail one-third as often

In the ultra-competitive startup market, time is of the essence. You need to beat your competitors to the finish line, but you don’t want to skimp on the quality of the product in order to finish faster. That’s where DevOps comes in.

DevOps is based on the Agile development philosophy, before which programmers and operations engineers worked separately. Developers would finish their coding and then hand it over to IT operations to implement. All of the business processes were siloed into the two different departments. This led to extremely long development timelines and a lower quality product.

DevOps for startups focuses on both departments working together throughout the entire process of product development. Having everyone on the same page from the very beginning is faster, more efficient and delivers better results.

How DevOps makes startups more stable and scalable

There are basically four ways that DevOps can help make a startup more stable and scalable. They are: continuous monitoring, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and automated data backup.

Let’s take a look at each in more detail.

Continuous monitoring

The sooner you catch a problem, the easier it will be to fix and the less damage it can do to the rest of your programming. By continually monitoring your production environment and setting up automatic alerts for any potential bugs, errors or situations that could cause your app to crash, you can cut down on costly technical debt.

Continuous integration

This is the process of having all developers integrate their code at its current state into a shared repository many times throughout the day. By doing so, the development team is able to detect problems and errors instantly and work them out prior to the next day’s development.

Continuous deployment

Continuous deployment allows you to release code into production automatically after it has passed through the testing phase. This is another way to improve the overall quality of the software in real time so that users are always accessing and benefiting from the latest version.

Automatic data backup

Backing up critical data automatically ensures the integrity and security of your information. You should implement an automated data backup and restoration process for your staging environment to protect your code and save yourself the headache, time, and expense it would take to recreate.

The 5 most essential DevOps monitoring tools for startups

There are hundreds of useful tech tools available to amp up your DevOps environment. The ones you choose will depend on your specific project and the team you are working with.

Based on our experience, these are the top five DevOps tools for early stage startups you should consider implementing.

Docker

Docker is a popular containerization platform that helps developers easily build, deploy, ship and operate applications without having to use a separate virtual machine for each app. Built on Kubernetes, Docker provides a single hub from which to manage and run all apps across all systems, including hybrid and cloud. Docker is currently used by millions of developers and features a library with over 100,000 container images from its devoted community.

SEE ALSO: What do top DevOps performers have in common? Tips for elite performance

Puppet

Puppet is an open-source configuration management solution used for automation in software development. The platform saves developers time by automating a lot of manual coding and daily grunt work. According to the company’s website, over 40,000 companies, including more than 75% of the Fortune 100 – have used or are currently using Puppet as part of their DevOps practices.

Ansible

Ansible is a product from RedHat that is similar to Puppet and is used for automation, infrastructure, and deployment configuration. Ansible makes it easy to automate cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and more. Many developers prefer Ansible over Puppet because they find it easier to use.

Git

Git is an open-source code management tool that lets developers track the progress of their project and save different versions of their code for reference. These versions are stored in repositories that are hosted in the cloud, such as on GitHub. Other team members working on the project are able to access the files and receive updates in real-time.

Terraform

Terraform is a tool used to improve software development infrastructure. It allows you to write infrastructure as code, plan and preview changes before applying, and create reproducible infrastructure – all while communicating each step with your entire team.

Conclusion

Every startup wants to grow up to be strong and eventually reach unicorn status. Solid DevOps practices are like Popeye’s spinach when it comes to growing and scaling. They’re the magic ingredient that can make your product bigger, stronger, faster and better than all your competitors.

Organisations across Europe believe that using an Agile methodology for software development can vastly improve the customer experience, while using DevOps can boost revenue from new sources.

A new report commissioned by software company CA said that 67 percent of UK organisations using an Agile methodology saw an improvement in customer experience, while firms using DevOps practices report a 38 percent increase in business growth from new revenue sources.

In addition, Agile reduces the time needed to act on new opportunities by 31 percent (from 13.69 weeks to 9.49 weeks) while DevOps lowers the time to develop and launch new apps by 26 percent (from 10.69 to 7.91 weeks), according to the research.

Other highlights include a 42 percent increase in employee productivity using Agile, while DevOps yields even better results with a 51 percent increase.

The report, Accelerating Velocity and Customer Value with Agile and DevOps, polled 1,770 senior business and IT executives in 21 countries, including 695 in EMEA.

According to Ritu Mahandru, VP of solution sales at CA, the report revealed a commonality of experience in the implementation of Agile and DevOps across Europe.

She said that 18 months after CA’s purchase of Rally Software, a provider of agile development software, the company was keen to assess the current state of Agile/DevOps markets.

“What we found was that almost like ourselves, our customers were doing DevOps and Agile in silos and were missing a trick,” Mahandru told ZDNet.

“Obviously, individually each produces results but we want to know what happens when you combine them,” she said.

“What we found out was that many of the organisations agreed with us: if you combine Agile and DevOps, you get much more success,” she said.

“This was reinforcing what I was seeing out there with customers anyway. They were beginning to look at how they could bring their DevOps and Agile practices together. But what we really need to look at now is how many of our customers are really combining it.”

Mahandru said more customers are putting a single manager in charge of Agile and DevOps. “I think that is a move that says that companies want one person to be accountable for this.”

Given that Agile and DevOps have been around for years, haven’t businesses been slow to adopt them?

“Yes,” she says, but adds that recently, “it has gotten a lot better”.

“I have been working on this for a long time — three to four years on DevOps and the last year on Agile — and honestly, now it is different. Before we had to evangelise a lot, telling people that they really should be thinking about a DevOps approach… whereas now when we come into customers, they already realise they should be looking at DevOps or Agile, and they are looking to us to give them our best experiences.”

Is there a difference between the UK and the rest of Europe when it comes to the take-up of Agile and DevOps?

“I travel all over Europe and I do think it’s culturally different,” Mahandru said. “I hate to say it but here [in the UK] we are a little more cynical about results. We are much more likely to dip our toe in then wait for results and go slowly.

“When I look at countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark, they are much more likely to commit more and get going. They are much more likely to say, ‘rather than let one team start, let’s try four or five’. They are more likely to go at scale to try things out.”

Nonetheless she knows of some “really, really, good Agile projects here in the UK”.