How Cloud Automation is Changing the Developer Experience
Cloud automation is a very broad set of tools that has the potential to drive efficiencies for developers.
As developers continue to face changes in the industry, requiring them to add more innovation to their products, cloud automation provides an opportunity for a more efficient and robust development experience, explores Suneel Ghei, principal research director, Info-Tech Research Group.
Developers in our modern world face many challenges as they seek to deliver innovation to their products. They are called upon to continually deliver complex functionality faster while simultaneously being challenged with increasingly complex environments and technologies. At the same time, they are also challenged by not being able to invest time in training and skills development as budget reductions continue to drive less time for non-coding activities.
Finding a way to mitigate these issues and improve their ability to do their job is key to successfully allowing developers to increase throughput, drive faster development, and deliver more complex solutions. Cloud automation might be the key to solving these issues and creating a better developer experience.
The Developer Experience
In keeping with the relatively new work of the industry-defining client journey maps and user journeys, the industry is also beginning to examine the developer experience. Organizations are now focusing resources on making a developer’s experience more efficient and robust to drive the same gains that client journey maps drive in their client base.
More efficient developer experiences mean that developers are less impacted by their environments and thus have more time to spend on development tasks. At the same time, a more robust, better-performing developer experience allows for the development of more robust and innovative solutions.
Lastly, a great developer experience has the potential to lead to increased motivation and satisfaction, which in turn increases their performance and retention. These are critical factors in maximizing companies’ investment in their resources, just as effective client journeys enhance client retention. These factors mean that investing in enhancing the developer experience has the potential to drive huge gains for the developer and their firm.
Current Challenges to the Developer Experience
Based on discussions with industry experts and Info-Tech Research Group members, developers today face many challenges related to their experience. These challenges can include the following examples:
- Consistency of environments: Development today must pass through multiple environments, from when the first line of code is written to when it is put into production. As a result, a consistent experience and configuration of environments are critical to limiting non-code issues.
- Speed of getting an environment: In our constantly moving world of technological innovation, it is critical that we maximize the time available to developers to create and test their solutions. As a result, ensuring that developers receive their new environments as quickly as possible is key to delivery frequency. In one case, I’ve seen an organization with manual processes for environment creation that led to new environments taking weeks to create, delaying coding.
- Lost time due to manual deployment issues: In many cases, deployments are still being done manually, and configurations are manually set, creating potential errors. Many of our Info-Tech members have raised the fact that deployment issues are a major cause of quality issues, either resulting in testing issues or production client issues. Both of these issues require developers to help debug, costing them development time on the next assignment.
- Test data management: A key element in code creation and testing is using production data or production-like data for testing. Creating and maintaining these databases can be highly labor-intensive tasks, and out-of-sync data will lead to quality issues, again impacting developers.
See More: Cloud Orchestration Vs. Cloud Automation: How Do They Benefit Your Business?
How Cloud Automation Solutions Can Help
Cloud automation is a very broad set of tools that has the potential to drive efficiencies for developers and resolve their challenges in their developer experience. These tools include:
- Environment creation tools: Automation tools are being increasingly used to create fully functioning environments in minutes. These tools can drive considerable improvements for developers, as they would be able to start development-related activities far faster.
- Deployment of applications: Strides have been made in the DevOps field, automating the deployment and configuration of releases. This results in a notable reduction in deployment issues, reducing time spent by developers debugging deployment issues that are mistaken for quality issues. It also maximizes testing time, preventing delays to project schedules when teams spend days debugging deployment issues.
- Maintenance of environment: Cloud automation also offers the opportunity to maintain environments, ensuring they stay up to date for patches and fixes, thereby ensuring that release schedules are not impacted.
- Data management: Cloud solutions can also build and manage the scripts to create copies of production data in lower environments. This ensures that developers are constantly working with the most current versions of test data and that no quality issues are related to out-of-date data conditions.
An Improved Developer Experience
Cloud automation has the potential to significantly enhance the developer experience, leading to:
- Faster entry into development cycles through automated environment creation.
- The creation of more complex environments that enhance innovation.
- Reduction in deployment issues, maximizing development time and reducing delays.
- Reduction in quality issues due to environment inconsistencies, data issues, and maintenance issues.
These opportunities mean that an investment in moving to the cloud and implementing automation in these areas will substantially improve the developer experience. This will result in increased efficiency, effectiveness, performance, and motivation within the developer community, maximizing the investments that firms make in their developers.
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