Embracing DevOps: Enhancing Efficiency, Reducing Costs, and Integrating AI for Business Transformation

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Swetha Yalamanchili, Head of DevOps at ITC Infotech

Q: Why should organizations embrace DevOps? How do DevOps help organizations to improve efficiency and reduce costs?

Organizations should embrace DevOps to build process, augment automation, security into their software development life cycle at speed and scale without sacrificing safety, while minimizing risks, ensuring compliance, and reducing friction and costs. DevOps plays an important role in promoting collaboration and automation between development and operations teams, reducing manual effort, minimizing downtime, and maximizing resource usage. This approach reduces human intervention and costs ensuring that resources are used efficiently.

Q: How is ITC Infotech helping its clients to solve various business problems through adoption of DevOps? Can you provide the key differentiators of ITC Infotech in DevOps practice from others?

ITC Infotech helps customers to solve various problems through the implementation of an enterprise DevOps platform that allows integrating agile processes for enhanced collaboration, automation and reevaluation of the software development lifecycle. This reduces development time by a significant extent and operational costs by quite a quantum.

We’ve developed sophisticated CI/CD accelerators that automates integration, deployment and testing processes, ensuring that our clients can deliver high-quality software rapidly and reliably.

Our deep domain knowledge and insight into industry-specific challenges enable us to customize our DevOps solutions to address unique needs. Whether it’s selecting the right toolset and right platform for financial services or meeting scalability demands in retail and consumer packaged goods, we tailor our approach to align with each sector’s specific requirements and best practices.

Q: How is AI influencing DevOps in the current times? Is it possible to give one example of how a business problem is solved through such integration?

AI is a transformative force that is reshaping the way DevOps teams work by optimizing CI/CD pipelines by predicting build failures, suggesting code fixes, and even automating rollback procedures, predictive analytics, and incident management, enhancing monitoring and alerts, optimizing resource allocation, and improving code analysis.

An emerging aspect of AI in DevOps is Generative AI (GenAI). GenAI takes automation further by generating code snippets, creating scripts, and providing infrastructure configuration suggestions. This reduces the manual effort required by developers and ensures consistency across deployments.

One example of a business problem solved through GenAI integration is the automation of observability and optimizing operations.

BMC AIOps showcases a notable application of Generative AI (GenAI) in observability and operational optimization. Their solution uses composite AI, which integrates various AI techniques, including GenAI and causal AI, to manage hybrid cloud infrastructures or edge infrastructure in mining and manufacturing, observability and ensures systems function as intended and proactively addresses any issues. This integration provides comprehensive observability across AI-powered environments, allowing businesses to harness GenAI technologies while maintaining high levels of performance and reliability.

Q: What kind of upskilling is being done by ITC Infotech in terms of keeping its staffers abreast of the changes in this field?

Some of the initiatives include:

• Training Programs: Regular training sessions and workshops are conducted to educate staff on the latest advancements in Generative AI, DevOps practices, and related technologies. These sessions cover both theoretical knowledge and hands-on practical skills.
• Certification Programs: Offering certifications in relevant technologies to validate the skills of their employees.
• Code Hackathons: By offering Code Hackathons in DevOps and Generative AI, encouraging participants to develop cutting-edge solutions that integrate GenAI into DevOps workflows.

Q: How is Generative AI (GenAI) beginning to influence the DevOps space and what insights can you share from your experience with GenAI in this context?

Generative AI is increasingly shaping the DevOps landscape by introducing advanced automation and machine learning capabilities. This integration promises more intelligent and efficient operations, but several challenges must be addressed These include the readiness and flexibility of existing DevOps tools, the cost implications of deploying GenAI solutions, and the complexity of customizing GenAI to meet specific business needs. Organizations must evaluate whether their current DevOps tools can integrate GenAI effectively and be prepared for the associated costs.

Ensuring that DevOps practices are mature and well-established before integrating GenAI will help maximize the benefits and minimize potential risks.

From experience, it’s crucial for organizations to ensure their DevOps practices are robust and mature before adopting GenAI to maximize benefits and mitigate risks. As technology progresses, we anticipate even greater advancements in automation, security, and innovation within DevOps.