Chapter 5: What is DevOps?

Semantically, DevOps is the combination of two words: development and operations. Beyond simple etymology, DevOps is a software development philosophy that aligns development and IT operations teams to deliver software in a repeatable, agile way. It’s best considered a cultural shift within an organization, aligning previously siloed teams to promote seamless workflows. 

DevOps practices hinge on constant communication for fast, efficient iteration. Development teams deliver new code to operations constantly so that code can be deployed immediately as a series of smaller, incremental updates instead of less frequent, larger updates. The result is a more streamlined development process that delivers continuous integration — a core DevOps principle. 

But wait, what does this have to do with device management? 

How DevOps relates to hardware

If you have dedicated devices, you have software that needs to be managed — apps, updates, security patches, and more. Traditionally, this has been an afterthought for many companies, leading to functional and security issues. Potentially big ones. 

We took everything that makes DevOps great for software development and applied those principles to hardware. DevOps uses continuous integration and continuous delivery — better known as CI/CD — where code is written and integrated into the codebase and then automatically delivered to the test or production environment. Esper takes this a step further with continuous deployment. We describe this as “CI/CD/CD,” where the second “CD” describes automatically deploying tested software directly to devices in the field. 

For example, let’s say you need to add 150 new devices. Traditional methods would have each one manually provisioned, which is time consuming and costly. Scale this up to thousands of devices and you suddenly have a team of people spending days or weeks just kitting devices. With Esper, you can provision them in bulk and have everything ready to go in a matter of minutes. And that’s just one example of how Esper leverages a DevOps approach for devices. 

Using DevOps to go beyond MDM

When applied to devices, DevOps principles allow organizations to go beyond simple MDM practices for total control of their devices. Software deployment, OS updates and security patch installation, configuration management, and more are all simplified, streamlined, and — best of all — automated. 

If you need a modern solution for not just managing a device fleet, but innovating and deploying software and products at scale, DevOps is the solution. This is a concept that we built our entire company on, and it’s one that we fully believe will revolutionize the way organizations big and small manage dedicated devices. 

We call it DevOps for Devices.