If you’re building a DevOps team today, cloud desktops delivered via Desktop-as-a-Service, or DaaS, can be a great way to help the team collaborate and coordinate activities based on DevOps principles. Whether your company uses cloud desktops already or is just beginning the migration from on-premises workstations to DaaS, DaaS can make it much simpler to construct a team of DevOps practitioners.
To prove the point, here are five ways that DaaS helps companies build DevOps teams.
What is a devops team?
First, let’s briefly define what a DevOps team is and how it may be structured.
Broadly speaking, a DevOps team is any group of IT professionals who work together accordingto DevOps principles. DevOps teams can be organized in different ways: They could consist of dedicated DevOps engineers whom you hire just to support DevOps, or you could form a DevOps team out of developers and IT engineers who are already on your staff. You may also choose to include other types of professionals, like software testers, on your DevOps team.
Thus, there is some variation in what DevOps teams look like. Yet no matter how you go about building a DevOps team, DaaS can help team members work together more efficiently and effectively.
Here are five ways in which cloud desktops make it easier for DevOps teams to operate.
Always accessible devops tooling
For starters, when your DevOps team works from cloud desktops instead of on-premises workstations, the tools they need to do their jobs are always accessible in the cloud. IDEs, CI servers, software testing and monitoring tools, deployment suites and anything else your team members need are available at a moment’s notice, from any device with an Internet connection.
By providing centralized, easily accessible DevOps tools, DaaS ensures that your DevOps teamcan collaborate readily whenever problems arise. They don’t need to be on-site in order to manage DevOps workflows.
Nor do they need to worry about using VPNs or RDP to log into on-site systems; DaaS platforms like DesktopReady make it possible to log in through a simple Web browser.
Scalable workstations
Scalability is part and parcel of DevOps. DevOps encourages organizations to adopt flexible architectures and to adjust resource allocations constantly in response to fluctuations in demand.
DaaS helps DevOps teams achieve these goals about desktop infrastructure. With DaaS, you can add or remove workstations from the organization almost instantly, without having to juggle physical hardware. In this way, DaaS brings unparalleled scalability to desktop infrastructure.
Fail forward
Another principle that DevOps encourages is the idea of failing forward. In other words, when something goes wrong, you embrace it as an opportunity to improve and keep advancing, ratherthan letting it become a setback.
Cloud desktops help DevOps teams fail forward by making it easy to maintain continuity in desktop infrastructure even when unanticipated problems occur. A server or disk failure in your local office won’t disrupt your DevOps team if the desktops they use run in the cloud. Likewise, if something goes wrong with a cloud desktop, the team can spin up a new one quickly and easily.
In these ways, DaaS helps DevOps teams embrace experimentation and recover quickly from setbacks.
No more silos on your desktop
DevOps is all about breaking down the “silos” that separate different teams and team members. In other words, DevOps encourages constant visibility and collaboration between all stakeholders.
Cloud desktops promote this goal by allowing DevOps teams to share desktop environments. With a platform like DesktopReady, you can securely assign a single cloud desktop to multiple users, making it easy for them to collaborate and share data and toolsets. In this way, DaaS helps to ensure that desktops don’t become siloed environments that are visible to and usable only by individual team members.
Continuous improvement
When DevOps teams run their desktops in the cloud, they can keep improving and updating their desktop environments on a continuous basis in the spirit of continuous improvement, another core DevOps principle.
There is no need to worry about physical hardware failure or hardware upgrades forcing team members to rebuild their environments from scratch. Instead, they can enjoy continuous evolution, even over a period of many years.
Conclusion
It’s possible to build a DevOps team without the help of DaaS.
However, by enabling easier collaboration between team members, centralizing DevOps toolingin the cloud, supporting continuous evolution of desktop environments and more, DaaS solutions like DesktopReady allow for more flexible, reliable operations by DevOps teams, no matter how exactly they operate or which challenges they face in “doing” DevOps.
