5 Ways to Know You Need a DevOps Engineer at Your Startup

Managing all the development processes and performing quality software solutions is very demanding. It is even more challenging for startups as it has to meet users’ demands and requirements using limited resources. Getting a DevOps Engineer who can help you release software updates more efficiently, automate a set of processes, and implement Continuous deployment/integration can help your startup with maximum efficiency and short product life cycles. It reduces operating costs and helps you in future scaling.

In this article, we will discuss why your startup needs a DevOps Engineer and How it can help give you an advantage in the market.

What is DevOps?

DevOps(Development and operation) is simply integrating development, testing, and operations under a single culture. It is linked with continuous delivery, integration, and automation of development, testing, and operations work. It defines the relationship between development and operations. It accelerates the ability for applications and services to be delivered fast and efficiently without breaking the bank or increasing the number of developers on your team.

Some DevOps practices Include:

• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery(CICD) as a DevOps practice is a process where every member of your engineering team is continuously merging small code changes back into the codebase and then runs a test automatically that checks the code for bugs or errors. Continuous Delivery helps you build a filtered version of your application by continuously effecting changes and fixes until you’re ready to push out to production. This can be achieved using tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, etc.
• Infrastructure as Code(IaC) is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes with the help of tools like terraform, cloud formation, etc.
• Monitoring and Logging involve monitoring the entire development process from planning, development, integration and testing, deployment, and operations. To monitor is to have a complete and real-time view of the status of applications, services, and infrastructure in the production environment. On the other hand, logging shows a detailed record of every action or event behind the scene of your running application. This helps you in knowing how to handle any error that comes up. This practice uses tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, etc.
• Testing automation helps run many tests frequently to ensure your application doesn’t break whenever new changes occur. It reduces the amount of human input in the testing process, saving time and detecting bugs. Some of these tools include Puppet enterprise, Jenkins, Docker, etc.
• MicroServices is designed to build a single application as a set of small services. Each service runs its process and communicates with other services through a well-defined interface using a lightweight mechanism, typically an HTTP-based application programming interface (API). Some of the tools used to build a microservice are RabbitMQ, postman, Apache Kafka, etc.

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Why Your Startup Needs a DevOps Engineer

Some of the aspects your startup may need a DevOps Engineer include:

• Application Monitoring
  Your startup's growth needs to know what your application is going through at all times. Application monitoring is a way to monitor production after deployment and get as many relevant metrics such as memory consumption, CPU intensity, Performance metrics, Availability and Scalability, and the ability to improve, debug and respond quickly within a short time. In addition, application monitoring gives performance metrics that help improve the product's reliability and prevent failures.
• Rapid Innovation and Efficiency
  DevOps combines both the development and operations teams, making the application ready for deployment faster. This is important for your startup because its growth depends on how fast and innovative your product delivers to the users compared to other competitors in the marketplace. When the development and operations teams work independently, it makes it difficult. It extends the cycle to which the application will be ready for operation by your targeted audience and market. The problems and changes to be made are broken down into silos, and it’s easier to fix faster as your different engineers will only need to fix the latest code and errors. DevOps best practices use automated tools, making the deployment process more efficient and predictable. This saves time and checks you from dealing with repetitive tasks.
• Communication and collaboration
  DevOps helps build effective collaboration between the developers and operations team in sharing responsibilities and combining workflows that reduce inefficiencies and save time. One of the core principles of DevOps is communication. Being able to deliver ideas and collaborate to reach common grounds are the building blocks for making development and operations work together. Collaboration is one of the most important cultures of DevOps by bringing together the development and operation teams together, prompt feedback, and communication help in making changes to our processes while keeping a stable and productive environment. Application development needs continuous and effective communication between the different teams responsible for the proper execution of the project, and the goal of the collaboration is to focus on the core development processes to reduce operational overhead.
  Development and operations teams can work together effortlessly around the clock using communication channels like Slack, Microsoft teams, etc.
• Continuous Integration And Continuous Delivery
  One of the key features that will make your product as a startup effective and experience growth is your product's fast innovation and release to get to your users faster. You can achieve this by engaging in a DevOps practice called Continuous Integration And Continuous Delivery. The quicker you can release new features and fix bugs. As a result, you can respond to your customers’ needs and build a competitive advantage. Continuous integration and delivery are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deployment. As a result, the software delivery speed is fast and undisturbed, unlike the traditional manual method. Continuous integration is simply automating the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project. Continuous delivery is a practice where code changes are automatically prepared for a production release.
• Reduces Expenses
  As a startup, one of the things you would want to avoid is too many expenses. DevOps helps cut down your organization's management and production costs as both development and production are brought under a single umbrella. With the practice of DevOps, you can release software faster with fewer engineers and manual work. It enables your teams to build, test, and deploy more quickly with fewer errors, significantly reducing release costs.

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Conclusion

This article has explained why you need a DevOps engineer for your startup. Adopting DevOps practices will help build a more disciplined software delivery team with fast delivery and automation. As a result, your startup will be more lean and agile by cutting on human errors. This will increases customer satisfaction and experiences.

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