Rapid development calls for the right support

Today's organizations are capable of high-speed development and must adjust their philosophies to suit this fact.

Organizations aren't developing software in the same ways they have over the past few decades. You've probably noticed it in your industry, no matter what that may be: Applications are becoming the dominant form of technology, and they are debuting at a rapid rate. Companies are keeping up this pace by changing the ways in which their departments communicate. If you create Web apps, either for internal or external consumption, assuming a faster strategy with fewer hand-offs may be your best chance to keep pace with fast, efficient competitors.

PaaS and DevOps Organizations looking for an especially fast release cycle may choose to aggressively integrate their software developers with their operations teams. The hybrid groups created by this process will be able to shepherd software from a concept to a final product. This is the DevOps movement, and it has become a popular go-to in today's business world.

As described in detail in our whitepaper "Coming to (Your) Terms With Platform-as-a-Service," DevOps is a natural fit with Platform-as-a-Service deployments. Communication is key to making DevOps work, as two types of professionals with historically divergent goals must come together to make their projects work as one. With PaaS, there is more transparency and visibility. Workers don't suddenly have to deal with code they have never seen before, which smooths the path to continuous deployment.

As the whitepaper explains, implementing and testing new app features is much quicker in PaaS than in conventional, on-site environments. This means the main responsibility in cloud-based workloads is getting employees ready to handle this type of speed. This is where DevOps and models like it come in, giving a structure to the new development status quo and building processes to suit the current technology.

Every industry needs apps Connecting people through apps is a necessary part of business today. Even if the software never goes beyond the walls of the company itself, businesses of all types are finding that a well-made Web application can suit their needs. Development can also be spearheaded by employees from outside the IT department entirely. This means the software could be uniquely in-touch with the needs of its end-users, leaving IT workers freer to push ahead with their own projects, as they simply offer oversight in these scenarios, rather than taking the lead at every step.