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Kickstarting DevOps: The Fast Path for Startup Developers

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Kickstarting DevOps: The Fast Path for Startup Developers
Author: Bob Gaydos | Wednesday, October 2 2024
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Startup Developers face numerous challenges. Managing complex infrastructures driven by shifting application requirements, automating CI/CD pipelines, and maintaining system reliability and scalability are just a few. These pain points can be severe for startups, blocking them from quick innovation amid constrained resources. To meet these challenges and pave the way for long-term success, startups should tackle DevOps proactively.

Most startup developers find it easier to begin with a solution that sets them up for long-term success. 

This webinar overviews how startups can position themselves for success in DevOps. It lays the foundation for a dynamic DevOps environment. It enables them to channel their valuable development resources into app creation rather than time-consuming, expensive DevOps maintenance.

In addition, this session provides knowledge for entrepreneurs seeking to integrate DevOps into their company's architectural framework quickly. You won't require extensive specialized expertise by beginning with a few core DevOps principles.

Harnessing the fundamentals of DevOps

Startup developers should understand that no configuration fits every DevOps environment. There are many variables to consider, from the funding stage to the size of your Development team and the technical and business goals you are striving to achieve.

Start by considering the system's architecture and reliance on cloud services and infrastructure management. These conditions set the foundation for deploying a DevOps model that aligns with a startup's operational dynamics and objectives.

From True DevOps to Platform Engineering 

A quarter century ago, when cloud computing was in its infancy, there were few choices for managing DevOps other than to hire large development teams with specialized knowledge. These teams were responsible for every deployment phase, from creating the application software itself to pushing it into the cloud and configuring and maintaining the middleware and back-end layer that supported the infrastructure. But cloud configurations don’t live in a vacuum and don’t tune and scale themselves for maximum performance and availability.

AWS was one of the first companies to create environments tailored explicitly to DevOps management (“True DevOps”). This specialization highlighted some inherent flaws in most development organizations. Not all developers had the same skill level in DevOps, and not all wanted that responsibility. 

Platform Engineering and the road to self-service

As more apps were pushed to the cloud and customer bases grew, more time was spent maintaining the underlying environment. Less time was spent on the customer applications. This workload usually fell to one or two developers, creating bottlenecks in knowledge sharing and scarce resources for training. In the fast-moving world of a startup, this restriction is both impactful and painful, impacting all corners of the organization.

These pain points propelled the need for a “self-service” model—ideally, where developers could manage their cloud with a general, rather than specialized, knowledge of DevOps. To accomplish this, developers required a democratized solution that fit their environment and skill sets. The focus shifted from “hire more” to “finding the right tool.” Enter Platform Engineering.  

Finding the best DevOps model for your platform 

Before you select a Platform Engineering solution, find a DevOps model that meshes with your tech stack and architecture. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Remember that the model you select will be the basis for any platform-based tools you leverage in the future.

Architectural/tech stack considerations for DevOps in startups

Scalability and seamless interdependence between services are critical for startup developers. Some architectural factors to consider include:

  • Do you integrate or depend on third-party solutions?
  • Do you want to use cloud-agnostic open-source solutions like Kubernetes? Or rely primarily on managed functionality in cloud environments like AWS, Azure, and GCP? Do you want to use the public cloud and Kubernetes?
  • Do you have SLA needs that mandate a private or On-Premises cloud?
  • Given the skill level of your DevOps team, what container orchestration platform is right for you? Kubernetes, or a higher level of abstraction as offered by AWS’s ECS, or Serverless?
  • What CI/CD workflows will you use to meet the automation needs of your developers and match the granularity of functionality offered in IaC methodologies? Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, CDK?
  • Will you have restricted internet access, necessitating air-gapped deployments?
  • What security and compliance standards are you bound to meet (SOC 2, ISO, HIPAA, PCI, etc.)?

Performance and Disaster Recovery

In addition to architecture, it’s important to define performance standards. Lead time in rolling out changes should be minimized to maximize responsiveness to application and customer requirements. How often you test and deploy is also a consideration. 

Anticipating failure and creating rollback strategies to counter it is essential. Optimize based on your expected recovery time. A comprehensive observability tool becomes critical. The more prepared startup developers are to handle a data breach or outage, the faster you can resolve them in the future. For example, check out how Netflix created Chaos Monkey to deliberately introduce simulated failures in disaster recovery drills. 

Build vs. Buy: a strategic decision for startup DevOps

As you can see, the number of considerations is daunting, and this is where DevOps teams, faced with the proposition of manual management, begin to search for a self-sufficient, automated, and scalable platform. The more time and expense you incur maintaining a DevOps environment often comes at a cost to developing your core applications, barring a limitless budget for DevOps experts. This is where the inherent value in comprehensive DevSecOps tools such as DuploCloud begins to shine, especially with the limited pool of resources available to most startups. 

Reaping the benefits of a comprehensive DevOps Platform

Measure the benefit of a startup developer DevOps platform by the degree to which it abstracts and minimizes the complexity of the public cloud environment without inhibiting a development team’s choices. As we’ve seen, there are many considerations when selecting a suitable model. Yet, an ideal platform also gives you the flexibility to pivot and use a combination of strategies and features to simplify DevOps tasks.

Six core DevSecOps benefits in one comprehensive tool

  • Enforcement of best practices and developer guardrails—Using a tool that abstracts complexity removes the guesswork from selecting the appropriate configuration and deployment options and shifts developer focus to application development, as you use minimal inputs to meet DevOps best practices. Guardrail sandboxes (DuploCloud Tenants), wholly isolated from the production public cloud instance, can be created with a single click.
  • Turnkey Security and Compliance—In addition to the complexity of DevOps, DuploCloud offers full-coverage security and compliance, at no additional cost, from a staff of SecOps experts who will create a scalable compliance framework and implement it for you. We automate 70% of controls at provisioning time and 30% at post-provisioning time.
  • Built-in monitoring and observability—DuploCloud uses several third-party tools to gather, organize, and display metrics, alerts, security and compliance auditing, and logging into easy-to-navigate customizable dashboards.
  • AI/ML integrations—Scalability and performance are of the utmost importance in AI/ML's dynamic, multi-workstream environment. DuploCloud offers a broad range of AI integrations and scalability solutions to accelerate workloads and maximize time-to-market, especially for resource-scarce startups.
  • Cost management—It’s easy to lose track of your spending in an ever-evolving DevOps workspace. With detailed, segmented billing dashboards, you’ll never be caught off guard when the bill from your cloud provider arrives.
  • 24/7 Support from DevOps SMEs—You have a dedicated support team with DuploCloud, with engineers with over two decades of experience. Each customer has their own Slack channel and receives personalized customer support.

The DuploCloud Shared Responsibility Model

Building on the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, DuploCloud adds an additional layer of efficiency and management between you and your public cloud provider.

Baked-in permissions and management simplify authentication, giving customers control of their application code and streamlining development focus. Operating System, Network, and Firewall configuration are managed seamlessly, along with Server-side Encryption and Networking Traffic Protection to ensure constant scalability, performance, and security.

For startup developers, the DevOps future is now

The Gartner Group anticipates that 80% of Fortune 500 companies will adopt a Platform Engineering approach to cloud DevOps by 2026. This makes adopting a secure and compliant platform now, rather than later, even more critical for a startup company with business in the cloud.

To summarize, Platform Engineering provides the missing link in taking a cloud startup from inception to market by:

  • Abstracting cloud complexity by minimizing the amount of DevOps configuration.
  • Ensuring security and compliance in a “set and forget” turnkey manner for multiple standards.
  • Minimizing the complexity of selecting a flexible DevOps strategy with a time-tested methodology and standardized and intuitive toolset that expands developer choices rather than limiting them.
  • Democratizing DevOps culture by simplifying complex DevOps tasks, freeing your development staff to focus on deploying applications in the fastest, safest, and most efficient way possible.

Startup DevOps: what's next?

  • Did you just get funded? This eBook outlines the criticality of compliance and shows how DuploCloud can seamlessly create and implement a scalable compliance framework at no extra cost to you.
  • Check out this eBook for more information about DuploCloud’s unique Platform Engineering proposition.
  • Migrating your cloud data can be an exhaustive and costly proposition. Why not let DuploCloud handle your migration? Our services are included with your subscription.

About DuploCloud

Using DuploCloud’s DevOps Automation Platform, you can automate almost all of the best practices listed above. The platform automates quick setup and “set it and forget it” management of flexible and scalable infrastructures and managed services across multiple clouds through automation and a team of seasoned DevOps professionals who customize according to your security and compliance needs. 

Author: Bob Gaydos | Wednesday, October 2 2024
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