Application Delivery Challenges for DevOps

Applications are at the core of interacting with today’s digital consumers and must constantly evolve to meet business demands.

The average application development cycle, using traditional methodologies, takes three to six months for initial release, with subsequent releases taking an average of a few weeks. Time frames such as these are no longer satisfactory.

One of the methodologies developed to address the need for faster development is called continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD). To support this methodology, a new function has evolved: development and operations (DevOps). As part of the maturation of DevOps, operations (Ops) has become just as critical as application development.

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NetOps, SecOps and DevOps

Application development now requires network IT operation teams (NetOps) and security operation teams (SecOps) to work together, thereby putting increased stress on developers and engineers.

Adopting DevOps creates a new breed of networking, security and development operation teams, which are tasked with ensuring that products and services will be developed in a timely, continuous manner while clearing any and all hurdles facing developers.

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Another market evolution that has occurred to support DevOps is the adoption of heterogeneous infrastructures, including on-premise, private and public cloud environments. As a result, any solution used by DevOps must be suitable for multiple infrastructure environments.

Common Challenges

Some of the common challenges that DevOps, NetOps and SecOps currently face include:

• Speed: Whether it’s setting up an application delivery service to see if an application works correctly when the traffic is distributed among several application servers or setting up a cluster of ADCs that have production-level capacity, speed is a challenge.
• Scale: For example, if application servers, as well as databases and other resources, are scaling within predefined thresholds set for an application, networking infrastructure, including ADCs, must be able to comply.
• Performance: When application service is under-performing, users may receive too many errors from the application. As a result, DevOps engineers have to troubleshoot issues with little to no visibility into application health and performance.

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Developers and DevOps must become more agile, and ADCs can serve as a catalyst for accomplishing this. ADCs allow application delivery services to be spun up and efficiently on demand — and use automation and intuitive user interfaces to open up their management to an array of non-technical users. Lastly, analytics provide insight and visibility into performance and service-level agreements (SLAs).