Interestingly, enterprise focus on the leveraging of DevOps and Mobile DevOps has largely emerged within a common timeframe. Consequently, when it comes to enterprise development, these dual sensitivities have created somewhat of a ‘chicken v. egg’ perception, where each technical value has tended to push the other toward enhanced operational growth.
While there are a host of commonalities between the two, when it comes right down to it, the primary technical tenets of each cleave rigidly to a singular value set. In the case of pure DevOps, the goal of the methodology is driven by compressing the entire development-to-production process; while in the case of the practical impacts of the evolved Mobile DevOps, the goal is driven by compressing the entire business transaction chain by creating the ability to quickly, and directly, engender activity between seller and buyer.
In a recent article by Modern Mobility Magazine, the collaborative and highly practical nature of these dual values was illustrated by the priority of responses associated with the following statement; “Mobility is just one of many reasons organizations adopt DevOps.
1. Improve app quality and performance
2. Improve end-user experience
3. Simultaneously deploy apps across multiple platforms
4. Increase the use of mobile devices
5. Release apps more quickly
6. Increase collaboration between dev and ops
7. Develop and deploy cloud-based apps
8. Address IT infrastructure complexity
9. Reduce IT costs
Note that while reduced cost and infrastructure simplicity are applied as they should be, these elements also ranked at the bottom of the list, while performance, quality, and enhanced user experiences were listed as being first and second, respectively. These are unmistakable hallmarks of both the pure DevOps methodology, along with an obvious representation of just how the emergence of Mobile DevOps is valued when delivering more practical business impacts.
As Jeffrey Hammond, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, suggests, “You want to get (business) feedback as quickly as possible, and then you want to act on that feedback as quickly as possible. (Consequently), it’s really hard to increase that speed without DevOps principles.”
As a general matter, Hammond’s comments are instructive to be sure; however, they also suggest an additional and critical value-driver that DevOps particularly fosters, an intrinsic capability to apply ‘baked-in’ analytics in real-time. For example, the DevOps methodology involves a host of useful toolsets, such as Puppet, Docker, Chef, and others, which allow mobile-app developers to intrinsically track and monitor user patterns, in addition to system, utility, and extended network behaviors. These resultant and highly-granular data products allow administrators, developers, and business managers to operate more effectively all the way from the front to the backend of a commercial transaction chain.
Along with these previous and largely self-evident values associated with customer-facing mobile-app development, DevOps delivers even more efficiency when it comes to dealing with the necessary bindery between a mobile app’s backend infrastructures. Since Mobile DevOps is all about the speed and accuracy of the ‘query-process-response’ loop, professional consultants teach and encourage developers to establish various script matrices that offer immediate, transparent, and, most importantly, replicable communication structures that can be applied operationally from the outset of any required product-set.
In the aggregate, then, these various advantages create a streamlined and force-multiplied development foundation from which the rapid delivery of mobile apps values can emerge on a nearly real-time basis, targeted specifically to a particular company’s business needs. That said, to get started, there is a large degree of knowledge engineering required at the enterprise level, “DevOps is not a tool,” says Puppet’s Carl Caum “You can’t buy it. You can’t hire for it. The company itself has to buy into it.”
In this case, as an associated technical cadre, DevOps consultants are always available to help to resolve any problem, whether an enterprise is just getting started on the methodology, in the event that a more mature project has come across a constraint, or a major problem that requires more seasoned experience than the enterprise alone can overcome. Either way, however, given the current business momentum associated with pure DevOps methodology or Mobile DevOps as individual business sets, when it comes to a deeply-collaborative technical paring, this particular business evolution is likely to provide for a number of amazing innovations in the future, along with facing the resolution of a long list of challenges along the way.
