Do you have a full understanding of what WebOps really is—and what it can do for you?
Ask 10 different people who work in the tech industry what WebOps is, and you’ll likely get 10 different answers:
- “I’ve never heard of it.”
- “It’s like DevOps only for your website.”
- “Isn’t that like a system administrator?”
What is WebOps, and why do you need it? At Engine Room Tech, we’ve seen the benefits of managing all aspects of your organization from one platform firsthand. In this post, we’re clarifying the meaning behind this mysterious term and taking an in-depth look at how WebOps can revolutionize your workflow.
The Need for WebOps
Many of the environments that organizations work within today could be considered enterprises, with enterprise software managed by enterprise architects, and enterprise hosting available to make it all happen. It’s all very dependent on the enterprise.
When you work within an enterprise, you get a solid, stable system.
What else do you get? A majorly expensive solution that’s been over-engineered with little wiggle room to do anything else. Oftentimes, it means you end up with a solution that’s so inflexible, you need a full team of engineers to do anything with it or make any changes.
This is where the benefits of WebOps become increasingly apparent. In our highly digital world, gone are the days of things being handled at the enterprise level. It’s just not enough. The reality of the problems we have to deal with today exceed the enterprise capacity; they need to be handled at the scale of the web.
An enterprise solution is insular; it’s a single unit like one company or one government agency, with no thought to what exists outside of it. Modern systems have to think bigger—they have to meet the needs of both your organization and its users. Your solutions don’t just exist hidden in a backroom somewhere. Now, instead of hiding your solutions in the back room, your solution is basically your storefront, your office, and the entire foundation of your business.
WebOps allows you to expand past the confines of the enterprise so you can create systems that match the scale of the entire web, giving your team the ability to do things like:
- Configuration management
- Continuous delivery
- Zero downtime deployments
- Flexible systems that can update and change to meet user demands
- Handle a high influx of users
- Automate your business processes
WebOps isn’t just about switching from one system to another. It’s about changing the way you think. When you work at the scale of the web, you let go of the idea of shutting down your system for maintenance at the end of the night. You’re creating a service that runs for everyone that anyone can use, anytime.
Understanding WebOps
Some may say that WebOps is a particular subsection of DevOps, which isn’t necessarily accurate. Unlike DevOps, which is all about restructuring the way that teams work together to create better software in record time, WebOps is laser-focused on one thing: creating the best possible website experience by enlisting the work of a team who all understand the way that your website functions.
Website operations, or WebOps, calls for engineering knowledge, compiling all aspects of the web application including:
- The environment it runs in
- The design elements
- The content
- The databases
- The code
WebOps covers everything and makes sure a website runs smoothly throughout its lifecycle. It’s one of the most important disciplines related to software engineering because it relates to what your clients and customers interact with most. It’s the most public part of your application suite and can help generate revenue for your organization. And when issues arise with your website, it can lead to a direct loss of revenue. WebOps keeps that from happening.
What are WebOps teams responsible for managing? What can Pantheon WebOps do for you?
- Determine and track success metrics, which can be as simple as connecting your website to Google analytics or can be more advanced to pair the work of developers and marketers together to understand and monitor things like A/B testing.
- Develop, test, and deploy web applications
- Creating a system that is easy to maintain and shift
- Help monitor websites for performance and errors
- Fixing bugs and performance issues
- Integrating content management systems like WordPress or Drupal so that it’s configured correctly
- Optimizing the agility and performance of the website
Pantheon WebOps
Pantheon WebOps offers a robust, feature-rich set of practices that can facilitate collaboration, automate your processes, and improve your entire web team’s productivity, helping your developers, designers, content editors, stakeholders, and more.
What do you get in return? Cross-functional web teams that are empowered to do more. With Pantheon WebOps, you can reliably develop, test, and deploy website changes in record time.
When you make the most of Pantheon WebOps, you get a host of features that speed up your website maintenance and workflow. It’s an all-in-one platform option that eliminates the headaches of deploying and maintaining a server. The basic functionality of Pantheon is undeniably valuable, but many of the more exciting features can get overlooked. These features and perks include things like:
- Experimentation without risk: you can’t think about the bigger picture when your website is down. Pantheon is a stable platform that enables your team to try new things and make changes.
- Publish freely: it can take forever to release a redesign, rebuild, or new platform. Pantheon WebOps makes it easy to make website changes the same day.
- Automate your processes: Pantheon WebOps teams can use the provided tools to automate common, complex tasks to free your organization up to focus on bigger, better things. Deployments, backups, and regression tests can all be automated so you can channel your energy into driving conversions.
What’s one example of what you can do?
Terminus, Pantheon’s command-line interface (CLI), delivers all the same functions that are available in the dashboard at a broader range, with the added options of flexibility and automation:
- Environment deployment
- Site spin-up
- Pulling databases
- And more
These commands can save your development team time, but the real benefits come when you couple Terminus with a bash script or git configuration. All those time-consuming, nitty-gritty portions of your workflow can be automated, allowing your development team to focus on building your site. Terminus can be used to:
- Create a new site
- Create and delete Multidev environments
- Clone from one environment to another
- Check for and apply upstream updates
- Deploy code from one environment to another
With Pantheon DevOps, you get a wider view of the web. It’s time to open your horizons and automate your workflows. At Engine Room Tech, we can help you get there. We’re an official Pantheon Partner, which means we’re well-versed in managing all aspects of WebOps on their platform.
We believe that innovation starts when you clear your field of vision so you can see the right next step plainly in front of you—and WebOps is the way to make that happen. Want to learn more?
Contact us today to take advantage of our experience and Pantheon partner pricing!
