What Is DevOps As A Service?

What is DevOps as a Service?

As the industry tilts more towards decentralized computing and microservices, the need to inculcate DevOps practices in their workflow has become the need of the hour.

Why DevOps as a Service?
Well, majorly because these practices have multiple benefits: improved collaboration, reduction of expenditures, scalability, and efficiency. Introducing DevOps automation to your work environment can lead to an enhanced user experience, along with a convenient workflow for developers.

But this serves another problem. We as humans, do not take well to changes in our comfort zone.

Would we really go the distance and learn an extensive and new stack to streamline our work?
This is where DevOps Engineers come in, individuals which excel at automating workflows.

However, recently, a newer phenomenon has surfaced: DevOps as a Service. This blog is going to cover DaaS and its viability, the pros and cons of DaaS, and various types of DaaS providers.

How does DevOps as a Service Work?

Through a delivery model like DaaS, any business can isolate and thus, outsource their DevOps-oriented tasks to experts. Therefore, businesses can leverage the expertise of third-party professionals and manage their infrastructure and workflows, without having to invest in their own hardware or software.

DevOps as a Service allows organizations to focus on their core business objectives while leaving the management of their DevOps infrastructure to experts. This helps companies to reduce costs, improve productivity, and speed up their time-to-market for software products and services.

DaaS constitutes of a lot of aspects. Just like how DevOps accounts for infrastructure, support, and monitoring, so does DaaS.

• Infrastructure Provisioning:
  DaaS providers provision the necessary hardware, software, and cloud infrastructure to support DevOps processes.
• Toolchain Integration:
  DaaS providers integrate various DevOps tools, such as code repositories, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, testing tools, and monitoring tools, to create an end-to-end DevOps workflow.
• Customization and Configuration:
  DevOps as a Service providers work with customers to customize and configure the DevOps tools and workflows to meet their specific needs.
• Management and Support:
  DevOps as a Service providers manage and maintain the DevOps infrastructure and workflows, ensuring that they are always up-to-date and running smoothly. They also provide technical support and troubleshooting assistance to customers as needed.
• Reporting and Analytics:
  DaaS providers provide customers with real-time reporting and analytics on key DevOps metrics, such as deployment frequency, lead time, and failure rate, to help them improve their software development processes.

Why is DevOps as a Service Becoming Popular?

In today's fast-paced business environment, speed and agility are critical factors for success. As companies continue to adopt agile development methodologies and embrace the cloud, DevOps has become an essential component of software development, and since most companies can not effectively invest in new talent to meet their optimization requirements, they often turn to the DevOps as a Service model.

Why DevOps as a Service? Let's take a look:

Scalability

One of the primary reasons for the popularity of DaaS is its scalability. As organizations grow and evolve, their software development needs change. DaaS allows companies to quickly and easily scale their DevOps infrastructure and workflows to meet their changing needs. This is particularly useful for companies experiencing rapid growth or those that need to quickly spin up new development teams.

Cost-effectiveness

DaaS eliminates the need for companies to invest in expensive hardware and software to set up their own DevOps infrastructure. This can result in significant cost savings, particularly for smaller companies that may not have the resources to build their own infrastructure. By outsourcing their DevOps infrastructure to a third-party provider, companies can focus their resources on core business objectives.

Expertise

DevOps as a Service providers have deep expertise in DevOps and can provide companies with best practices and guidance on how to optimize their development processes. This expertise can help companies improve their software quality and speed up their software delivery cycles. By partnering with a DaaS provider, companies can tap into the knowledge and experience of industry experts, without having to hire their own DevOps specialists.

Flexibility

DaaS providers offer a range of customizable DevOps services, allowing companies to tailor their infrastructure and workflows to meet their specific needs. This flexibility allows companies to optimize their development processes and achieve faster time-to-market for their products and services.

Time-to-market

DaaS providers typically have pre-built DevOps workflows and toolchains that can be customized to meet the specific needs of customers. This enables companies to quickly set up and launch their software development processes, reducing time-to-market for new products and services. By leveraging the expertise and resources of DevOps as a Service provider, companies can accelerate their software development cycles and gain a competitive edge in their respective markets.

Pros of Using DevOps as a Service

Surely enough, DevOps as a Service is gradually becoming an essential aspect of software development. It provides a vast majority of advantages to an entity's workflow, as summarized below:

Cost Savings

One of the significant advantages of utilizing DevOps as a Service (DaaS) is that it has the potential to decrease expenses. Rather than spending on expensive infrastructure, tools, and personnel to establish DevOps processes in-house, businesses can opt for DaaS providers to access the required resources at a reduced cost. DaaS vendors provide various pricing plans that businesses can customize to fit their specific needs.

It allows companies to pay only for the services they require, thus cutting down on expenses. Additionally, DevOps as a Service providers have access to specialized tools and expertise that may be too costly for businesses to obtain by themselves. Through the utilization of these resources, companies can realize cost savings while simultaneously enjoying the benefits of DevOps. These benefits include streamlined collaboration, accelerated product delivery, and superior software quality.

Faster Development

DevOps as a Service (DaaS) can significantly speed up development processes. DaaS providers offer a range of tools and services, such as Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD), that can automate the development and testing processes, enabling teams to deliver software faster. This allows developers to focus on more important tasks, such as designing and improving products, rather than spending time on manual testing and deployment.

DaaS providers also offer the flexibility to scale resources up or down as required, allowing businesses to quickly respond to changing demands. As a result, companies can deliver products and features to the market more quickly, increasing their competitiveness and ultimately leading to faster growth.

Automation of IT Tasks

One of the most significant advantages of DevOps as a Service (DaaS) is the automation of IT tasks. DaaS providers offer businesses an opportunity to automate their workflow, thus improving efficiency and reducing manual errors. By automating tedious and repetitive tasks, businesses can free up their developers' time, enabling them to focus on more critical tasks such as creating new features and applications. This not only increases productivity but also helps developers to stay engaged and motivated.

Moreover, automation ensures that businesses can release new updates and features more frequently, reducing time to market. Businesses can create a continuous delivery pipeline where every code change is built, tested, and released automatically. This ensures that new features and updates are made available to end-users quickly and efficiently, which can be a significant competitive advantage. Automation of IT tasks also ensures that businesses can easily integrate their applications, databases, and infrastructure with their DevOps environment, thus streamlining the entire software delivery process.

Cons of Using DaaS

As impressive as the DevOps as a Service delivery model is, it is still relatively new when it comes to software development. Let's dive deeper into the cons of DaaS:

Security Risks

One concern that arises with the use of DevOps as a Service is a security risk. Data breaches, compromised credentials, and unauthorized access are just a few of the potential security threats that could occur. As DevOps as a Service providers handle sensitive data and access company systems, they must implement robust security measures to mitigate these risks. This includes measures such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular security audits.

It is crucial for businesses to perform due diligence when selecting a DaaS provider to ensure they have appropriate security measures in place. Companies should inquire about the provider's security policies, certification, and compliance with industry regulations. Additionally, they should assess the provider's track record and reputation for security incidents. By taking these steps, businesses can minimize security risks and reap the benefits of DaaS.

Lack of Control

Another one of the downsides of utilizing DevOps as a Service is the lack of control that companies have over their infrastructure and processes. By relying on a third-party provider, businesses must trust that the vendor is appropriately managing their resources and systems. Companies may find themselves unable to make adjustments or modifications to their DevOps processes, tools, or infrastructure as per their preferences. This loss of control can be concerning for businesses that have specific requirements or regulations to adhere to.

Despite the lack of control, DaaS providers offer a significant advantage in terms of expertise and support. They possess specialized knowledge and tools that can aid companies in establishing DevOps practices more efficiently. They also provide continuous support and maintenance, allowing businesses to focus on their core operations. Additionally, by utilizing a DaaS provider, companies can access a broader pool of talent and resources, which may not be available in-house.

Limited Customization

DevOps as a Service also results in a limited amount of customizations provided to a business. DevOps as a Service providers offer pre-built solutions that cater to a wide range of customer needs, but these solutions may not align with every business's unique requirements. As a result, companies may be forced to compromise on some aspects of their DevOps implementation or incur additional costs to develop custom solutions. The limited customization can also make it challenging to integrate existing tools and processes into the DaaS environment.

If a company's competitors are using the same DaaS solutions, they may end up with similar DevOps processes, leading to a lack of differentiation. In such cases, businesses may need to invest additional resources in custom development to maintain a competitive advantage.

While DaaS offers several benefits, the limited customization options available can be a disadvantage for businesses. However, companies can minimize the impact of this limitation by carefully selecting a DevOps as a Service provider that offers customization options or by supplementing their DaaS implementation with custom development. Additionally, businesses should assess their requirements and align them with the solutions offered by DevOps as Service providers before making a decision. By doing so, they can ensure that they are receiving the most value from their DaaS implementation.

DaaS and DevOps Tools in the Cloud

The rise of cloud and decentralized computing is one of the reasons why DevOps-oriented software development has become as widely accepted as it is. Obviously enough, major cloud service providers provide a variety of tools that help businesses adopt DevOps more conveniently.

Amazon Web Services

AWS provides a pretty versatile suite of services and tools which help get about their cloud services conveniently. From automating infrastructure provisioning programmatically to code pipelines that deploy production-ready code within minutes, AWS has got you covered. Here are some of the major contributions by AWS to DevOps:

AWS CodePipeline

CodePipeline is a continuous delivery service that allows us to easily configure, build, cache, and package our code conveniently. All we need to do is add our source code's version control, write a file declaring how to package the code, and specify which services to deploy our code to, and CodePipeline handles the rest.

Needless to say, it also integrates well with most AWS services, provided that CodePipeline already constitutes AWS CodeBuild and AWS CodeDeploy. CodeBuild is the service that handles the packaging of the code, whereas CodeDeploy deals with the deployment process.

AWS CloudFormation

With the cloud, we have a convenient way to get access to IT resources quickly. Traditionally, we'd have to buy some hardware, store it in-house, configure it, and then use it but now we can just provision infrastructure online and get access to it via SSH.

This process can be automated via AWS CloudFormation. You make a YAML (or JSON) file declaring what infrastructure you want to provision and its hardware configurations, upload it to AWS CloudFormation and it will provision everything for you. This practice is called Infrastructure as Code(IaC).

Businesses often need to provision multiple servers. This eliminates the need to manually browse the AWS website and provision everything one by one, which is also prone to human error.

Microsoft Azure

Azure DevOps is an entirely different SaaS DevOps solution that features plenty of features.

Azure Pipeline

Azure Pipeline, just like AWS CodePipeline is a CI/CD tool that is oriented for the Azure cloud environment. It is compatible with a plethora of frameworks and languages, and can successfully deploy to multiple targets, be it VMs or containers.

Azure Test Plans

While Azure Pipeline can help you seamlessly transfer your code, Azure Test Plans help with testing the code packages. This tool allows users to practice unit testing, exploratory testing, and even acceptance testing.

Azure Test Plans can even be automated. Needless to say, this is an incredible tool for DevOps.

Google Cloud Platform

GCP boasts of an unsurpassed network of developmental tools with easy-to-use, user-friendly interfaces. Let's see what GCP provides in the context of DevOps.

Cloud Code
Yes, you read that right. With GCP, you get a full-fledged IDE in your browser on which you can develop fully functional applications right on the cloud! Talk about version control!

Cloud Deploy
Cloud Deploy is a managed delivery service using which, you can target multiple IT resources and deploy your applications to all of them at once, or one by one, whatever suits your use case.

Choosing the Right DevOps as a Service Provider

Throughout the article, we've mentioned how in the DevOps as a Service model, we outsource our DevOps-oriented tasks to third parties. How do we choose the entity we allow to manage our tasks though? There must be a million organizations or freelancers willing to help. What qualities should there be in an ideal DaaS provider?

What Should You Look For in a DaaS Provider?

Let us cover the major factors we should consider when looking for a DevOps as a Service provider.

A Broad Skillset
A DevOps as a Service provider should have a diverse range of skills and experience to offer. It is crucial to look for a provider that can cater to your specific needs, regardless of how complex they may be. This means the provider should have expertise in areas such as software development, system administration, automation, and cloud computing.

They should also be well-versed in modern DevOps tools and frameworks. A provider that possesses a broad skillset can offer greater flexibility and ensure that your DevOps processes are efficient and effective.

24/7 Availability
Another critical factor to consider is the provider's availability and support. Your DevOps tasks may need attention at any time, so you want to work with a provider that is available 24/7. Not only should they be reachable at all times, but they should also have the necessary resources to provide quick support when needed.

This can help minimize downtime and ensure that your projects stay on track. Additionally, a provider that offers proactive monitoring and maintenance services can help prevent issues from arising in the first place, saving you time and money in the long run.

Security-Oriented Practices
When entrusting sensitive information to a third-party provider, security is a paramount concern. Therefore, it's important to choose a DaaS provider that follows best practices in security and has a proactive approach to handling security risks. The provider should have policies and procedures in place to protect your data and ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of your services.

They should also have a disaster recovery plan in place in case of a security breach or outage. You should also ensure that the provider has a dedicated security team responsible for managing security-related incidents and responding to security incidents in a timely manner.

Ultimately, choosing the right DaaS provider requires careful consideration of various factors. By choosing a provider with a broad skill set, 24/7 availability and support, and security-oriented practices, you can ensure that your DevOps tasks are managed efficiently, effectively, and securely.