DevOps as a Service (DaaS): Transforming Enterprise IT Operations

A software update failure led to one of the most infamous outages of the year: the Crowdstrike Outage. The incident is estimated to have cost Fortune 500 companies more than USD 5 billion. Per the congressional testimony by Crowdstrike’s officials, the downtime wasn’t attributed to a malicious attack but a configuration and software update failure. Incidents like these make us question how we deal with our digital ecosystems - the configurations, the monitoring, the testing, etc.

Consequently, the cascading doubts lead to one ultimate question - Is there a need to upgrade DevOps as we know it?

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Traditional DevOps, if you may call it that, often involves an ecosystem of tools and technologies that help with CI/CD, monitoring, testing, and more. Managing and integrating these resources at an enterprise scale is a big challenge. Moreover, technologies like cloud, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in DevOps are much more difficult to handle.

The slightest failures in this management can lead to severe consequences like flawed update failures that cost billions of dollars. With a centralized framework that can help DevOps teams troubleshoot the disparity of these resources, it is nearly possible to navigate modern digital offerings. 

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This is where DevOps as a Service (DaaS) can help. The DevOps services management offered by DaaS can help enhance automation pipelines, mitigate downtime risks, and standardize DevOps operations for good. Therefore, in this blog, we will discuss what DaaS is and why it needs to be the next step in our DevOps journey.

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What is DevOps as a Service (DaaS)?

DevOps as a Service (DaaS) is a managed suite of DevOps resources, including tools, configuration, APIs, and more. This standardized framework helps centralize and deliver DevOps capabilities at a large scale. DaaS offers a self-service model where development and operation teams can access and manage DevOps resources, workflows, environments, and more.

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Importance of DaaS in modern enterprise IT operations

It is not just about the ignored misconfigurations or potential downtimes. DaaS can help enhance the core DevOps offerings of automation, collaboration, CI/CD, and more. Here’s how it is essential to modern DevOps strategies.

• Accelerating speed to market: Traditional DevOps spends a lot of time setting up custom environments, integrating tools, and ensuring fully operational workflows. DaaS is required to reduce this time by offering pre-configured, standardized platforms and automated workflows.
• Integration of security: Balancing the time-to-market and security measures in DevOps is another challenge for the various teams. DaaS capabilities are required to automate vulnerability assessments, monitor CI/CD pipelines, and manage compliance.
• Abstracting DevOps Complexities: Managing modern digital ecosystems requires specialized expertise in areas such as CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), monitoring tools, and more. DaaS helps DevOps teams handle these areas with more accessible and scalable solutions.
• Continuous Monitoring - DaaS platforms centralize monitoring and observability with unified dashboards and real-time insights. This enables enterprises to proactively identify and address issues, ensuring system reliability and uptime.
• Scalability needs - DaaS is inherently designed to scale with organizational needs. Its centralized architecture supports expanding teams and their diverse requirements by enabling quick adaptation of complex workflows.

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Core principles and components of DaaS

The one-liner motivation for DaaS is - “making DevOps simple.” Therefore, all the core principles that DevOps operates upon also guide DaaS efforts. Here’s how:

• Collaboration: The primary idea of DevOps is to bring different teams, such as development, IT operations, testing, security, and more, together to collaborate. DaaS enhances this collaboration by offering a centralized platform where different teams can communicate, coordinate, and implement their processes using various tools.
• Automation: DaaS can enhance DevOps' automation efforts in various aspects of the SDLC. It offers readily available tools for automating testing, deployment, infrastructure management, and other DevOps workflows.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): DevOps is not DevOps without CI/CD. Therefore, DaaS enhances CI/CD’s benefits for DevOps teams by ensuring pre-configured pipelines, easy code integration, mindful resource optimization, and more. 
• Security and compliance: For security purposes, DaaS can essentially streamline all the DevSecOps efforts, including compliance checks, vulnerability management, misconfiguration scanning, and more.

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Difference between traditional DevOps and DaaS

In the chain of DevOps evolution, DaaS stands much ahead of what the traditional DevOps practices used to be. The differences are no longer subtle but very evident and remarkable. Here’s how DaaS distinguishes itself from traditional DevOps.

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Why do enterprises need DaaS?

Operating in global markets requires enterprises to ensure streamlined workflows and sophisticated technology solutions that help make quick decisions and develop growth strategies. This is why DaaS is a better option than other DevOps trends. Here are some of the specific points where enterprises need DevOps

• Global Scale Operations: Enterprises often operate across multiple geographical regions. Therefore, standardization of operations will help simplify DevOps management across the globe.
• Faster Speed to Market: The speed of launching and updating software solutions is a critical dealbreaker for enterprises. DaaS helps reduce this time by providing pre-configured tools, APIs, and platforms that allow enterprises to faster time-to-market.
• Integrated Security: Unlike traditional DevOps, DaaS integrates security (DevSecOps) into every stage of the development lifecycle, ensuring compliance and reducing vulnerabilities.
• Scalability for Large Teams: Enterprises with large, distributed teams often face scalability challenges as they grow. DaaS solutions are inherently scalable, allowing enterprises to support expanding teams and projects without worrying about infrastructure or process limitations.
• Diverse Technology Stack: Managing multiple tools, environments, and platforms is complex in enterprise settings. DaaS simplifies this by providing a unified ecosystem tailored to specific needs.
• Future-Readiness: With continuous updates and cutting-edge features, DaaS ensures enterprises are equipped to handle evolving market demands and technological advancements.

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Key features of DaaS for enterprises

Now that we understand how DaaS can be implemented in enterprises, let’s examine its specific features.

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Integration: DaaS can automate infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and management by offering support for tools like Terraform, Ansible, or AWS CloudFormation.
• Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Cloud Support: Modern enterprise needs for DevOps are more directed towards cloud infrastructure provisions. DaaS offers support for various cloud environments, including multi-cloud and hybrid. This allows enterprises to build and manage applications across multiple environments.
• Pre-Built CI/CD Pipelines: The CI/CD offerings by DaaS are fueled by pre-built libraries meant to fully automate and customize the pipelines. This facilitates faster code integration, testing, and deployment.
• Integrated DevSecOps: From a security perspective, DaaS has all the necessary DevSecOps support. It aims to embed security at every stage of the SDLC with tools for real-time vulnerability scanning, code signing, automated compliance checks, and more.
• API-Driven Automation: DaaS also ensures support for APIs by offering easy integration with third-party tools and customizing workflows to match specific enterprise requirements.

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Benefits of implementing DaaS in enterprise IT

• Simplified Infrastructure Management: DaaS eliminates the need for on-premise hardware by offering support for cloud infrastructure. This shift helps the DevOps teams focus on higher-level enterprise strategies that cannot be bothered with hardware maintenance.
• Flexible Digital Ecosystems: With a centralized platform that has integrated tools and pre-built workflows, DaaS can help businesses scale their digital offerings up or down as per the enterprise needs.
• Cross-Platform Operations: DaaS allows the endpoints to be accessed remotely to ensure device independence and consistent UX. Daas makes sure that users can access virtual environments to run their operations.
• Customizable Configurations: With support for tools like Terraform, Ansible, and more, DaaS can help customize configurations for resource optimization, operations management, risk handling, and more.
• Disaster Recovery: DaaS has many benefits for disaster recovery, including centralized data storage, automated backups, geo-redundancy and more. Moreover, its customizable configurations also help adhere to disaster recovery regulations of different regions.  

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Industry-specific use cases of DaaS in enterprises

Here are different industry-specific use cases to help you understand the practical implications of DaaS for enterprises.

1) Healthcare

A global healthcare provider aims to standardize its patient care platform to offer consistent service to patients across regions. However, the challenge is that the business must adhere to multiple compliance regulations. Moreover, with scattered teams, managing the platform's operations can be complex and time-consuming.

By leveraging DaaS, the provider deploys and can acquire virtual environments that are accessible across all locations. This environment will integrate EHR tools, compliance monitoring tools, and secure communication platforms.

2) E-Commerce

An e-commerce company wants to launch flash sales platforms for different regions during the holiday season. However, Tight deadlines for launching the platforms require rapid software development. The team also needs to address the surge in website traffic during these events. DaaS can help with this challenge by offering pre-configured environments, automated CI/CD tools, automated testing tools, and more to a collaborative approach in development.

This will reduce the development time, and the company can launch its flash sales website by the deadline.

3) Fintech

A fintech company expanding globally needs to onboard hundreds of developers and testers for a new digital banking platform. The problem is that the rapid onboarding of a distributed team requires scalable security resources to protect the digital ecosystem.

DaaS comes to the rescue with its role-based access, infrastructure monitoring, compliance management, and more offerings. Therefore, the fintech company can successfully scale its operations without worrying about security.

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Conclusion

DevOps as a Service is not a replacement for DevOps but an augmentation. All the right reasons fueled the need for enterprises to use DevOps, and DaaS will now serve them better. Enterprises like Crowdstrike handle operations for big and small businesses across the globe. Therefore, they need solutions like DaaS to ease their DevOps workload and save them from humiliating downtimes and failures.

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