4 Tech Strategies Revolutionizing Business Operations

Expert Opinion By Heather Wilde, CTO, theDifference @heathriel

Technology has long played a role in driving strategy and encouraging innovation. We see this in digital creators using AI for growth or to streamline social media management. We see payment tech simplifying international payroll and even helping fight online ad fraud.

Behind each of these innovations are a host of DevOps professionals, who are increasingly leveraging additional tech resources to make their work more effective and iterative than ever before. Here's how the DevOps community uses today's cloud provisioning methods to foster innovation.

Understanding DevOps and modern cloud provisioning.

Today's cloud provisioning methods are largely driven by infrastructure-as-code (IaC) methodologies. These systems are designed to execute the setup and management of servers and development environments by using high-level descriptive language. This helps reduce the risk of human error and ensures the reliability of sprawling infrastructure by eliminating the need for manually configuring systems.

In the past, administrative tasks such as security protection, system monitoring, or even specifying required processing power required a more hands-on approach. Conversely, IaC ensures that these underlying elements of cloud provisioning can be largely automated. 

This infrastructure setup has advanced alongside the rise of DevOps, which sees development and operations teams working together throughout the software lifecycle. The combination of tech resources that automate the underlying system with a more collaborative work environment can significantly streamline production, improve communication, and develop a culture of continuous innovation.

In an interview with Env0's The IaC Podcast, Gruntwork CTO Zach Goldberg notes that many of the innovations and applications that are implemented through IaC tools stem from the DevOps community at large. As community members suggest features or actions they would like to implement, the open-source IaC software ecosystem focuses on innovations that allow these features to scale, to be managed in a centralized manner, and to fuel further collaboration. 

IaC and innovation.

While automating the manual management of cloud provisioning infrastructure is an exciting prospect, how does it actually help foster innovation? The DevOps approach that leverages IaC ultimately makes software development faster and more scalable. 

For starters, modern DevOps methods are designed to facilitate the rapid iteration of app versions, via a model known as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). This creates a constant flow of new components and features that can be coded in different experimental cloud environments, some of which eventually merge with an app's live version.

This approach speeds up the process of building, testing, and deploying new software features by leveraging the combined resources and knowledge of IT and development teams. Thanks to IaC, these teams can manage different cloud environments using coded commands, making such iterations more scalable and able to be released at a faster pace.

This streamlined approach can be especially important in today's competitive market, where market shifts and new competitors are a constant. A solid DevOps approach ensures that new code isn't just delivered quickly but that it is also reliable and resilient when delivering desirable features to end users.

The automated nature of IaC also improves a system's overall stability. Thanks to automated testing, DevOps teams can get more accurate and immediate feedback on test results and the impact of different updates. Improved system monitoring also provides more useful and accurate information, allowing DevOps teams to respond quickly to outages and other performance issues.

The ability to swiftly build, release, and obtain feedback on software features or products, as well as the ability to respond quickly to performance challenges, ultimately fosters the greatest amount of innovation because it allows for rapid iteration. This creates a cycle of continuous learning and improvement that fully harnesses the capabilities of DevOps teams.

Driving future innovation.

As software products become more sophisticated (and complicated), DevOps communities have become essential for driving collaboration, productivity, and innovation. With the help of IaC and cloud-provisioning solutions, DevOps teams can help companies improve revenue growth, efficiency, and more as they achieve new tech solutions and applications. 

The combination of tech and human ingenuity offers exciting prospects moving forward by enabling rapid iteration and continuous learning. As businesses utilize this valuable cloud provisioning model, they can create a powerful competitive advantage that allows them to streamline their own internal operations and better serve their customers.

Photo Credit: Getty Images.