The need to innovate faster, manage multiple environments, optimize an application’s life cycle and achieve continuous delivery are aspirational goals that a successful DevOps team strives for. But there are loads of challenges, as meeting these goals increases the pressure on DevOps teams to adopt improved application architecture, new tools and developer workflows.
The overarching principle of DevOps is continuous effort, including continuous business planning, collaborative development, continuous testing, continuous release and deployment, continuous monitoring and collaborative customer feedback. This is where low-code development platforms are emerging as an integral way to empower DevOps teams.
If you look closely, low-code and DevOps share common benefits: The ability to offer faster, scalable and complex applications consistently to meet business needs.
However, many DevOps teams still rely on conventional manual coding and automation. Low-code can also supplement the talent shortage by enabling folks without extensive programming experience to develop and deploy applications faster.
How Low-Code Platforms Impact DevOps
Automated Application Deployment: Low-code platforms increase the speed of DevOps while also reducing the overall complexity by providing a unified platform to enable the cultural shift. From managing version control to validating builds, low-code platforms do all the heavy lifting for your developers. With low-code, you can deploy almost anything in a single click—user interface, workflows, database and/or integration components.
Clutter-Free DevOps: Low-code platforms allow you to integrate with different programming tools using APIs, SOAP and REST web services.
Hassle-Free Migration: Organizations can keep their legacy systems alive longer by making their functionality available to many other systems. Consider developing an Android and iOS mobile application on top of your existing CRM system. While your core system maintains, a low-code platform allows you to develop add-ons or new apps on top of it. Furthermore, because low-code platforms provide easy-to-use tools, citizen developers may participate in the migration process.
Maintenance at Scale: With low-code, you don’t have to worry about updating apps over time because the platform designer always updates and refines the stored interfaces—and, as a result, your application—without even bothering you.
Enterprise-Grade Security: Security is a top consideration when building scalable apps. Low-code platforms enable your IT and DevOps teams to manage data and user access. Each user can be provided with access to only the information and functionality that they require based on their roles and responsibilities.
Compliance and Security: Legitimate low-code platforms adhere to the Global Compliance Assurance Standards, as well as ISAE and ISO certifications. Security should be a top priority for your platform, which will serve clients from a variety of businesses, including government entities. Besides integrating robust security and governance features, make sure that your platform has also implemented an ISO/IEC 27001-compliant information security management system (ISMS).
Democratizing IT: Bringing Business and DevOps Together
A major challenge for DevOps is to constantly meet the changing needs of the business. The invariably dynamic nature of processes demands continuous optimization, which turns out to be a bottleneck for business, especially if IT can’t deliver applications on time. To make this whole approach scalable, low-code platforms provide multiple environments for your business and DevOps team to test, build, deploy and modify applications collaboratively.
A comprehensive low-code platform offers the means of both visual programming and coding capability. For usability reasons, these tools are clearly separated and presented to the development team in a way that allows citizen developers and business users—who are most commonly the domain experts—to use the visual components while developers can work on adding custom code to extend the capabilities of the application.
While a complex app can only be developed by an experienced professional developer, modifying the look and feel of an app or building/modifying basic functionality can be carried out by business users/citizen developers.
Moving IT Up the Value Chain From Executor to Enabler
IT teams are now viewed as critical to enabling their businesses to achieve greater productivity and profitability. By providing a self-serve model using a low-code platform, you can enable citizen developers to build custom apps, employees to use portals at their convenience and create dashboards to improve everyone’s visibility, among other value-adds.
The key is to provide your teams with the right set of tools with the right level of access while still enabling IT to manage and monitor these low-code applications’ reach. For DevOps and IT leaders, it provides an opportunity to empower businesses with strategic insights and recommend solutions that best suit business goals, mitigating risks and offering budgeting strategies, rather than just being a facilitator of technology.