The impact that software engineering has had in just a few decades has been significant, touching every segment of our socioeconomic landscape. As a result, there is a high demand for expertise in this field. In turn, software development has experienced a paradigm shift due to DevOps, which unifies development and operations teams to ensure the ease of collaboration and seamless delivery.
From startups to large enterprises, organizations are actively adopting DevOps practices because of the value it brings. In one survey, by Forrester Research, about 50 percent of organizations had implemented DevOps, and according to analyst Robert Stroud, DevOps is being implemented in every industry sector.
Since DevOps facilitates a faster delivery time, it also improves ROI. But expertise is pivotal for any company’s successful DevOps integration. Organizations that successfully adopt DevOps have found that training is critical to their success.
What Is DevOps, and Why Does it Matter?
DevOps bridges the gap between development and operations to accelerate the delivery of the latest capabilities and services. It enables collaboration and automation between business units with streamlined integration, development and deployment. As the development teams respond to business needs quickly and with agility, they improve the customer experience.
Software development teams are always striving to innovate more quickly and reduce the time it takes for their software to reach customers. The agile model was born of this need for flexibility and speed. DevOps, in keeping with its nature of continuous improvement, is a natural progression in the evolution of development processes.
Challenges in Adopting DevOps Practices
A major challenge for organizations is the shortage of experienced and trained technical professionals. For smaller organizations, integrating cutting-edge technologies to solve problems is comparatively simpler but still demands technological expertise. Standard practice would dictate either hiring a new college graduate or an experienced DevOps practitioner. Since DevOps is relatively new, though, neither graduates nor the general workforce have been able to gain expertise yet. This lack of expertise also compounds challenges with integrating these processes around legacy software systems.
How Can DevOps Training Help You Overcome These Challenges?
DevOps practices’ benefits, which include increased collaboration, rate of delivery, and ROI, highlight the need to address the lack of skilled practitioners. Training for the business units that would be implementing these practices is the most effective way for any organization to cohesively understand and integrate a DevOps methodology. Leverage technologies for a more personalized, one-on-one training experience. Blended learning, which includes social learning and variety to make learning more interactive, is proving to increase learning retention. Having trained DevOps professionals would then translate to higher innovation, research and development and to redefining the software development landscape.
DevOps practices have the ability to boost agility, automation and monitoring at every stage of the software development process. There are organizations that still have not transitioned from old software engineering practices, and course curriculums in colleges rarely include emerging technologies like DevOps. Training and certification in DevOps will have a dual benefit for employees and departments who can upskill themselves and enhance their organization’s ROI.