Software development has changed significantly in recent years. This transformation is, in part, a response to challenges resulting from the traditional waterfall software development model.

Under the old process, a software company receives a deadline for creating a product that’s ready to roll out to customers. The firm activates its team of developers, which spends its time working on the product before handing over the project to the operations team. These individuals are responsible for testing and ultimately deploying the completed software.

The problem with traditional approaches to software development is that developers and operations personnel maintain limited interaction with one another. Without proper integration, both teams can’t bring their input to every stage of the project.

Instead, an assignment must proceed in sequestered phases that commonly run into problems. Issues cause delays, thereby potentially interfering with the scheduled release of the product.

Given these and other problems, it’s no wonder more organizations are embracing a DevOps software development model. This standard requires such close collaboration between development and operations that the two groups are merged.

In so doing, DevOps streamlines the software development by bringing otherwise disparate teams together and boosting their mutual productivity.

Amazon sums up the key business advantages of DevOps in the following definition:

“DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.”

One of the integral changes in the shift to DevOps is automation, a force which has been taking tasks away from system administrators for the better part of the decade.

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