DevOps

5th August 2019

‘DevOps’ is the combination of cultural philosophies, standards, practices and tools that give organisations the ability to design, build and operate ever-evolving resilient systems at scale. According to data from DevOps.com, the adoption rate increased substantially from 2015 to 2016, from 66% to 74%. With the rate continuing to grow, it’s clear this relatively new term is so much more than another IT buzzword. With a change in culture and mindset, organisations can remove the barriers between two traditionally “siloed” teams; development and operations – working collaboratively to optimise both productivity and reliability.

Zinc’s significant investment in DevOps

Here at Zinc, we’ve invested in new processes, applications, software developers and very senior staff to deliver the DevOps model across our business. Our goal is to give our partners “a better communicative experience and a better working day,” and the DevOps model has enabled us to innovate faster through automating and streamlining software development and infrastructure management processes, whilst delivering the following advantages:

• Help organisations adapt to changing markets better.
• Enable developers and operations teams to work in perfect harmony, driving efficiency. 
• With increased agility, we can create, develop and improve our quality SaaS products and applications quickly. 
• By adopting a DevOps culture, we improve the reliability of software, as faster and more frequent release cycles allow us to recognise and resolve issues quickly.
• We help leading businesses operate and manage complex infrastructure and development processes at scale. 
• Develops and operation teams collaborate, sharing responsibilities and combining workflows to boost efficiency and increase speed.
• We monitor and enforce compliance dynamically at scale, ensuring security measures are properly enforced. 

The importance of DevOps in the SaaS sphere

Our platform is a license-driven SaaS solution that is simple to use and quick to adopt, helping improve the accuracy of data reporting, intelligence gathering and communication, whilst keeping track of activity. The DevOps approach is at the heart of our pioneering suite of products. Both SaaS and DevOps are entwined, and we’ve been able to deliver code more reliable, quickly and efficiently, guaranteeing a resilient and scalable application environment that leading enterprises can depend on. 

The switch to Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Zinc Systems has moved our infrastructure to AWS to boost our technology, improving performance, scalability and reliability. Amazon Web Services is highly regarded as the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, yet it’s also the most flexible and secure cloud-computing environment. 

Going serverless (shifting more of our operational responsibilities to AWS) is of course a huge step forward, eliminating time consuming and tedious infrastructure management tasks such as server or cluster provisioning, patching, operating system maintenance and capacity provisioning. This has enabled our highly trained team to focus even more on our core products, remaining at the forefront of the digital industry providing innovative enterprise-level solutions that are highly secure, flexible and scalable. The shift to AWS also gives us access to data and actionable insights, so we can better monitor applications and respond to system-wide performance changes, seeing a clear view of operational health. To deliver high-quality software products faster, we use Jenkins to automate deployment, bringing better transparency among team members, proactively fixing issues quickly, whilst saving businesses from critical downtime. 

DevOps is an evolving philosophy and framework that encourages faster, better application development. Here at Zinc, it’s enabled us to accelerate software delivery, but the transformation has required a great deal of investment across the board, as well as a complete shift in culture and approach to deliver superior products for our partners. 

Watch this space for further updates…