How low-code can fit into the DevOps culture

The digital transformation drive has resulted in better and faster software development needs. The faster development needs have resulted in increased demand for a talent pool that is capable enough to deliver what is expected. However, you may not always have the resources or the time for it. Application development is not everyone’s cup of tea. Especially, not all of us like or have to play around the coding part. So, what is the best way to deal with this? And the answer to this could be low-code development.

Low-code development is an approach that provides developers with an ability to build applications rapidly by minimizing the efforts of hand-coding to cope-up with the software demands. It normally involves a visual or graphical user interface comprising of wizards, templates, drag-and-drop facility to facilitate software development. With low code, the traditional approach to write the code line-by-line gets eliminated and the setup and deployment part is becoming swifter than ever. All you need to do is define the logic and flow. And TADA! The code will be produced thereby reducing the intricacy of the application development process. There is still scope for improvement but the low-code platforms come in handy when it comes to creating apps related to business process management, project management, database management, innovation applications, etc.

I am sure that the idea of speed excites everyone. Organizations are no exception. They aim to create applications rapidly. With automation and tools that come with it, we have been able to accelerate the slow and manual processes involved in the development, deployment, and integration phases. And with the certain cultural change that involves better collaboration form the Dev and Ops teams, this can be taken to the next level. Yes, you guessed it right. I am talking about combining DevOps and low code. While DevOps is mostly about a cultural shift, low-code is a family of tools that rightly increases the benefits of agile. Low code reduces the focus on the coding part and DevOps means effective collaboration. And the result of combing these two means increased speed of development and deployment. Let’s see what happens when these two meets.

When low-code meets DevOps:

Now that you know both low-code and DevOps have a common motive. Let’s check out how low-code app development platforms can be useful for DevOps to achieve the best outcomes.

• Bridging the gap between growing talent needs and available pool: With low-code, even novice or aspiring coders/developers can easily build as well as modify the processes without even having to write the complex lines of code involved in the traditional app development methodologies. Not only this but with low-code, your highly skilled developers can focus on core projects. This means you have a part of the workforce focusing on development which is now relatively faster and easy while the other part is focusing on other complex and vital aspects.
• Expediting application development: Low-code makes it easy to create the application builds that are easily accessible and not very complex. It speeds up the complete development and deployment process thus significantly reducing the timelines from months to days and from weeks to hours.
• Consistency — from development to deployment: Low-code platforms can integrate easily with programming tools that automate the application deployment. Besides, they can assist in some of the vital processes in any DevOps culture such as version control, build validation, QA, etc. Having one platform that can provide all this with ‘no’ or ‘low’ code can increase the speed of DevOps teams and at the same time reduces the overall complexity. This means that the developers don’t have to worry about the compatibility part as the app gets deployed in the same traditional fashion, because you might be worried that the app is created by a non-developer. The low-code platform easily gets integrated with the organization’s workflow. There isn’t any risk of disruption involved and make the teams confident.

To understand how low-code is slowly becoming part of the development, you can see how some of the major players are focusing their efforts on low-code platforms. Over the last few years, some of the organizations are either making advancements or have already started making low-code environments an integral part of their development processes. The main goal is to be able to create, test, and deploy a variety of applications to obtain good results and better business opportunities, faster than before. For example, Microsoft has already started bringing low-code platforms to DevOps. Microsoft has combined low-code scheme and DevOps with a major focus on three components. They have followed this approach to their new class of tools that includes Power Apps. Power Apps is a platform as a service with which you can create applications using your browser. Let’s see what are those three components:

• Build: For Azure DevOps, a certain set of build tools are being examined by Power Apps whose purpose would be to eliminate the scripts that are downloaded manually. These scripts are usually used to manage the application lifecycle. Thus, the efforts to download scripts manually by the developers are automatically removed with the help of these specific build tasks.
• Test: With the testing features you can easily manage end-to-end testing and the developers can add, manage, and organize test cases and validate new functionalities easily. For example, you can automate UI testing of model-driven apps and Dynamics 365 with the EasyRepo framework.
• Monitor: The monitoring feature identifies the existing and potential errors and enhances performance. One of these monitoring features used in the Canvas Studio can help in debugging by checking the network trace calls to see the data returned and…read more.