Overcome the DevOps Talent Gap with Environments as a Service

Overcome the DevOps Talent Gap with Environments as a Service

DevOps is becoming the most critical function in software development but there is a shortage of talent to support needs across technology driven organizations. Applications have evolved and the shift in architecture is now to be more closely intertwined with development than ever. 

Developers have new requirements that are invented by the evolution toward containerized applications and microservice-based architectures. Instead of just focusing on their code, they now need to be more mindful of how their code relates to the infrastructure that supports their applications. 

The interconnected web of dependencies that live under the hood are difficult to unravel as new technologies, processes, and systems have been introduced and then retired over the years. When large companies have adopted a plan to move toward modern application architectures, they are subject to the constraints of their existing ecosystems. Startups are unique and often can start developing their applications’ architecture from a blank slate.

The Problem

The irony of containerized applications and microservice architectures is that the same problems arise around DevOps for both startups and large enterprises. The problems exist around dependency management, server maintenance, and support for consistency across environments. 

Changes in computing, technology, and processes are going to continuously evolve and adapt at a speed that is faster than most teams’ ability to keep up. We can only do our best to increase time to value and accelerate productivity to make sure we remain inside the window of survival.

A lack of sufficient DevOps talent should not eliminate the rollout of a strategy to future proof your business. Complementing your existing DevOps team with technologies that add the services and automation in areas that they don’t have bandwidth to reach is how teams can accomplish more with less. 

Technology companies need to support DevOps, automate their workflows, or stand in their place when there is a void of not having a team in place. The reality is that every company is a technology company in the 21st century, and everyone is going to deal with challenges around bandwidth issues in their DevOps organizations. If the talent pool is so small in the industry, there is a high chance that your pool of hires will also be too small for the needs of your business over time.

DevOps hires are so important because not only are they limited but they are the people that determine what the organization should or should not do to streamline development. We are too dependent on people in a field that should allocate investment where it is measurable and within our control.

The Solution

Environments are where the visions and strategies developed by DevOps come to life. 

Preview environments that have all of the tooling, technology relationships, data, APIs, and all other criteria vital to application performance result in faster development lifecycles. The value of environments that replicate production in pre-production phases of development is obvious but standing up those environments is a strain on time and resources. In many cases, creating these important environments is so time consuming and costly these important steps are skipped, much to the detriment of the entire business.

Release complements DevOps teams or can replace the DevOps overhead of smaller organizations through automated execution of workflows. We make it easy to run your engineering organization within an advanced DevOps framework without the additional headcount or reduction of resources. We accomplish this by offering a platform for Environments as a Service (EaaS) where we configure your applications to enable automated creation of environments with each code commit that live in isolation to provide visibility at every change. In this way, organizations can hire DevOps talent without additional headcount, and even gain productivity at mass quantities.

On-Demand environments take the workload of provisioning and maintaining servers off of your engineering team so that they can focus on code instead of spinning up servers. Release offers  a hands off process to run your microservices and apps on Kubernetes (k8s) to spin up environments within a matter of minutes. DevOps can prioritize more important tasks while engineers can bring software to production with velocity when reproducible environments are accessible to all.