If you could travel in time, what would you do? Revisit a defining moment in your life? Find next week’s winning lottery numbers? Would you go back and create an alternate timeline where provisioning cloud environments takes only minutes instead of days or weeks?
If you’re in the software development business, a significant aspect of controlling your company’s costs is reducing your operating expenditures by managing time—time for development, testing, deployment, and perhaps most importantly, the time it takes to get your product to market. Though many technology companies have adopted DevOps practices to reduce many of the time-consuming processes associated with software development and delivery, they are still contending with obstacles that waste time and slow product releases.
3 Ways to Take Back Your Time with Infrastructure Automation
Be More Efficient
Organizational efficiency and the prudent use of valuable resources are crucial aspects of lowering costs. Since payroll is one of the most significant costs in any company’s budget, it goes without saying that minimizing the time spent on any given task allows for greater productivity within your organization. One way to do this is to remove organizational friction by eliminating bottlenecks. Automating infrastructure for software development is one way to allow both Development and ITOps teams to work simultaneously. This helps speed production and reduces the need for workarounds which potentially increase costs, cause performance issues, and leave you open to security vulnerabilities.
You can squeeze greater efficiency out of your environments with a DevOps-ready infrastructure automation platform. Since the different environments within your cloud infrastructure have different requirements, you should utilize an infrastructure automation platform that can quickly spin up reusable environments dedicated to development, testing, or production. This reduces the time and resources necessary to manage projects which, of course, can translate to significant cost savings.
An infrastructure automation solution that allows you to monitor different environments with the same tools saves your teams time by eliminating the complexity of learning and using a patchwork of different systems.
Beat Your Competitor to Market
A quicker time to market is a decisive market advantage for your business. The first step is spinning up the necessary environments for your development and testing teams to do their jobs. If it takes more than a few minutes to spin up a production-like environment, it’s time to travel into the 21st century. Both pre-production and production environments have specific and unique requirements which can add time and complexity. By automating the provisioning process, blueprinting the environments, and making them available to developers via self-service, each environment can be quickly provisioned and tailored to the specific needs of individual teams in a fraction of the time it would take to hand code each individual environment.
Ongoing management and maintenance can be a time sink if it’s not done right. Reducing the time your teams spend managing upkeep will allow both IT and DevOps teams to make the best use of their time and resources, significantly increasing productivity across the board. In contrast to cloud environments created using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) which requires people with highly advanced skill sets, infrastructure automation reduces the time necessary to maintain, administer, control, and secure your value stream. Not only that, but it also significantly reduces the time that IT teams spend managing and monitoring DevOps environments.
Scale, Scale, Scale!
One of the main objectives of any business is to achieve scale. Your infrastructure automation platform should provide the features necessary to speed production, reduce bottlenecks, and simplify your processes while maintaining security and governance. Whenever you can confidently automate your processes, you should seize the opportunity as it allows developers to spend more time doing their jobs and less time waiting for the resources they need to do so.
For example, creating and utilizing templates for your production processes allows your business to move quickly, accelerating current and future projects. Source-controlled, reusable blueprints for your software development protocols will increase the speed and consistency with which your company is able to bring new innovative products to market.
Take Back Your Time
Savvy business leaders understand the direct correlation between time and money. That’s why companies put so much effort into making their processes less cumbersome and trying to use their resources as efficiently as possible. However, achieving those objectives can also waste valuable time. But it doesn’t have to—not when you have access to the right infrastructure automation solution like CloudShell Colony. If your business is stranded in the past, learn more about how to bring your DevOps practice into the 21st century. Download the Infrastructure Automation Maturity Model white paper to learn about the future of software development.
