DevOps is a new way of thinking about the relationship between development and operations. It’s not just about automating deployment, but about fundamentally changing how we work together to make sure that what we build actually works for our customers in production.
In this article, I’ll explain why AAA games are a perfect fit for DevOps principles, and how adopting DevOps can help you increase the quality of your product while reducing costs.
The Role of DevOps in AAA-Game Production
DevOps is a cross-functional team that includes developers, operations, and quality assurance. The DevOps team is responsible for automating the build, release, test, and deployment of software. They also manage the infrastructure that runs the software.
As games become more complex and ambitious in their scope and ambition from AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto V to VR experiences like Beat Saber the need to build out a robust DevOps process becomes even more important.
Budgeting Challenges in Game Development
As the cost of game development continues to increase, AAA-game production needs more effective budgeting strategies. For a detailed insight into why AAA games are becoming more expensive and how to address these challenges, you can visit https://kevurugames.com/blog/why-are-aaa-games-so-expensive-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-budget/. The challenges are especially acute for large companies that produce multiple titles each year. These publishers face increasing pressure to increase their games’ quality while also supporting them with consistent features and content updates over time. To achieve these goals, they need to streamline their development process and make sure it aligns with business goals.
Streamlining Development and Operations
DevOps is a culture of collaboration between software developers and IT operations professionals. It’s a set of practices that help to automate and improve the software development process, with an emphasis on monitoring performance and making changes quickly. DevOps aims to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve quality by reducing risk from human error during deployment.
In order for AAA games to compete in today’s marketplace they need to be able to deliver new content on a regular basis while also maintaining player engagement levels over time – this means integrating DevOps practices into your game production pipeline so that you can keep pace with your players’ expectations while keeping costs low enough so as not put yourself at risk in terms of ROI (Return On Investment).
Tools and Technologies for DevOps in Game Development
The tools and technologies for DevOps in game development and production are vast, but we’ll focus on the most commonly used ones.
Jenkins CI
This is an open source automation server that automates the build process of your code and makes sure it’s working properly before you push it out to production. It also allows you to run tests against your code so you can be confident that nothing has broken since last time you checked in some changes.
Docker
Docker is a virtualization platform used by developers to isolate their applications from other applications running on the same machine or server (e.g., databases). It allows them to create lightweight containers with just enough resources required by a specific application, which means less overhead when running multiple processes simultaneously a big plus when trying not only to keep things running smoothly but also save money!
Cost-Efficiency Through Automation
Automation can help you reduce costs and improve quality, efficiency, collaboration and security.
Reduce Costs
Automation is one of the best ways to reduce costs in software development. It’s easy to see how this works – if you’re writing code that can be reused by other teams or even other projects then there’s no need for them to pay someone else to do it again. Similarly if there are manual processes that could be automated then this frees up time for more productive work which will also lead directly into greater productivity overall as well as freeing up resources such as servers or storage space (or even just giving developers more room).
Improve Quality
Automating tests means they run faster than before so any bugs found earlier rather than later; this leads directly into higher quality code being produced overall since bugs tend not only cause problems while using them but also increase risk when working with other people who may not know about them either until later down the line when something goes wrong unexpectedly during testing or production use cases etc.
Collaboration and Communication in Cross-functional Teams
Communication is critical to success in a collaborative environment. It’s important to know how your team members work and communicate, as well as how they prefer to receive information. If you’re working with someone who prefers written communication, make sure you provide them with detailed updates on progress through email or Slack; if you are working with someone who prefers verbal feedback, make sure that their voice is heard during meetings so everyone knows what’s going on.
The best way for teams within AAA-Game Production Studios (like ours) to collaborate effectively is by using tools like JIRA and Confluence for project management; Trello or Asana for task tracking; Slack for real-time communication; Skype/Google Hangouts/Facebook Messenger – whatever works best!
Risk Mitigation and Quality Assurance
The DevOps process is not a silver bullet, it’s an ongoing process. It requires buy-in from all stakeholders and requires constant attention to detail. As such, it’s important to keep an eye on your team’s performance while they’re working through the DevOps process so that you can identify any issues early on and take care of them before they become bigger problems later on in production.
As you can see from this example, there are many different ways for organizations to integrate DevOps into their AAA-game production pipeline and depending on what kind of budget you have available for IT infrastructure upgrades (or lack thereof), there may be certain processes that work better for your organization than others do but regardless of what route we take with our development teams or how much money we have available for new tech investments like cloud services or containersized applications running on Kubernetes clusters at scale with thousands upon thousands of nodes across multiple availability zones.
Measuring and Monitoring DevOps Success
Measuring and monitoring DevOps success is a crucial part of the process. It’s important to know how your team is doing, what they’re working on, and why they’re doing it. The more data you have about your project, the better equipped you are to make decisions that will help improve its quality and efficiency.
In order for us to measure our DevOps success accurately, we need metrics that provide insight into how well our processes are working as well as where improvements can be made in order for us to meet our goals more efficiently than ever before.
There are many different types of metrics available: some measure things like cost per feature or cycle time; others focus more on customer satisfaction or user experience (UX).
Conclusion
Game developers are always looking for ways to improve efficiency and increase profits. DevOps is one approach that can help AAA-game developers with these goals. The tools and technologies available today offer powerful solutions for streamlining development, testing, deployment and operations across the entire lifecycle of a game project from start to finish.
