The 7 Benefits of DevOps
The DevOps approach quickly gained the IT industry's attention in recent years. The DevOps Market Research Report shows that "The Global DevOps Market size was estimated at USD 4,311.95 Million in 2020 and expected to reach USD 5,114.57 Million in 2021, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) 18.95% to reach USD 12,215.54 Million by 2026".
Moreover, according to the Atlassian DevOps Trends Survey 2020, 99% of IT decision-makers and developers say that DevOps has had a positive impact on their organizations. 61% say it has helped them produce higher-quality deliverables and 49% say it has improved their deployment frequency.
With the proven value that DevOps provides, you have enough reasons to start looking into the many benefits that DevOps can offer to your business.
Read on to know more about DevOps best practices and the various benefits that your business can gain by adopting DevOps.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of the development(Dev) and operations(Ops) teams in an organization. It is a business-driven approach that enables fast, frequent delivery of value to customers using agile methods, automation, and collaboration.
The DevOps culture bridges the gap between the Development(Dev) and Operations(Ops) teams to increase the efficiency of your business.
The main goals of DevOps are to:
Make frequent software releases.
Improve the speed of development and scalability.
Automate as many tasks and processes as possible.
Benefits of DevOps for Your Business
The 2021 DevOps Trends Report shows that 63% of businesses that use DevOps practices have improved their deployments quality and 38% have improved the overall quality of their code.
The DevOps approach provides huge impacts for your business by increasing software delivery speed, reducing costs, and improving your team performance.
Adopting DevOps provides a ton of benefits, but these are the main ones that will provide immediate value:
Faster Release and Deployment
Traditional software development projects require rigorous approvals. This results in a lot of wasted time especially when many manager's approvals are needed. Ultimately, this results in a lot of delays in the project.
With this approach, reducing cycle time is one of the major challenges that your development team has to deal with every day. Introducing a change goes through several processes like prioritizing, scheduling, implementation, testing, and deploying into production. The time it takes to complete all the steps for that change to be implemented is very long.
One of the best benefits that you can get in adopting the DevOps approach is velocity. DevOps ensures faster delivery of features. It helps drive shorter release times to quickly respond to market demands.
With DevOps, you can:
Push frequent and smaller deployments to production.
Utilize automation to ensure a smooth development process flow.
Adapt shorter release cycles for faster and continuous releases.
Implement frequent upgrades that enable you to sustain your business in a competitive market.
Reduce go-to-market timelines to achieve an edge over competitors.
Increases Business Agility
Developing an environment that leverages IT to achieve business objectives is a challenge to most organizations due to differences in departmental goals. As a result, businesses fail to adapt to the ever-changing demand of their end-users. Because of this, providing an effective return on investment becomes a challenge.
DevOps creates an environment that aligns business and IT towards a common set of well-understood objectives to help you achieve targets on time. It creates a collaborative environment across development and operations teams to deliver business value with higher efficiency.
DevOps practices enable your business to be more agile and flexible in balancing its capacity to respond to challenges and stay ahead of the competition.
The DevOps approach:
Ensures quality is always a priority with every team.
Transforms IT to deliver innovation and agility.
Enables you to continuously deliver features that bring value to your customers.
Improves the way how your team adopts and implements the required changes in the development process.
Fast and Reliable Delivery of Services
In the digital business era, turnaround needs to be quicker and more seamless. A slow turnaround directly hurts the quality of the product. This could potentially develop a decrease in the team's morale as well. As a result, delivering good quality software products with the expected number of features on time is difficult to achieve.
DevOps aims to create a faster and more efficient software development process. It enables you to carry out continuous testing and monitoring at every stage of the software development cycle.
With the DevOps approach, thorough verification of the features covered is done at every sprint and QA will no longer be delayed until the entire development is completed.
The speed of delivery is essential to increase customer satisfaction. The quicker you release new software features and fix bugs, the faster you can respond to customers' needs.
DevOps methodologies enable you to:
Perform continuous integration and delivery.
Innovate and improve your product faster.
Facilitates continuous quality monitoring.
Increase the frequency and pace of the software release process.
Ensure that changes do not slow down and interrupt the current process.
Improve developers' skills for delivering better quality code with lower turnaround time.
Promotes Better Customer Satisfaction
One of the challenges in software development is how to minimize the time it takes to deliver value to customers. For businesses to remain competitive, they need solutions that help them meet their customers' demands at a faster pace and best quality.
DevOps ensures customers get the best software product based on their needs in the shortest time possible. This approach aims to provide a better experience and increase customer satisfaction. It encourages regular feedback and constant improvement to create more reliable and stable software solutions.
DevOps enables you to:
Offer the best value and high-quality software to your customers.
Identify and resolve issues earlier in the development phase through feedback loops.
Develop better software products based on customer needs for a better user experience.
Deliver high-quality software on time to increase customer satisfaction.
Reduces Cost
In a highly competitive environment, reducing your product development costs has become a necessity. With traditional product development tools and techniques, this is quite impossible to achieve. Because traditional methods are quite costly and often 64% of the budget spent on developing these methods is wasted on developing features that may not be used or required by the customer.
With DevOps, you can easily balance the flow of work across teams and increase productivity. It enables you to leverage best practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery with better scalability and reliability
DevOps enables you to release software faster by automating your release pipelines. As a result, you can reduce the needed manpower and cut software release costs.
The DevOps approach helps you:
Save money by speeding up the implementation rate of your customer feedback into production.
Reduce maintenance and upgrade costs by removing unnecessary capital expenditures and decreasing budget overruns.
Encourages Innovation and Improvement
More often your business may face interruption when making an addition or change to a software product. And that simple addition or change to your software product often consumes more time and effort. With the traditional approach, the development team spends more time performing manual tasks and solving issues instead of spending more time on innovations and improvements.
With DevOps agile practices, you can easily make all these changes seamlessly that drive your business continuity.
DevOps implementation gives you more time to innovate and improve your business processes and workflows. It enables you to streamline your business processes and improve efficiency. This change gives you more time to brainstorm and develop new ideas for your business to grow and succeed.
DevOps encourages an innovative mindset that enables your teams to better understand and improve an existing system or create new products and ideas. With DevOps, your teams will be able to:
Try out different ways to achieve better results.
Develop a new alternative to an old process.
Create better solutions to improve product quality.
Innovate and deliver services that are valuable to your customers.
Promotes Better Collaboration Between Teams
In delivering quality software to customers, more often the development(Dev) and operations(Ops) teams don't always agree with each other. While the Dev team wants to deliver software changes like new features to customers quickly, the Ops team wants stability. This means that the production systems are not changing too often.
DevOps brings the development and operations teams to work together toward a common goal. This approach promotes teamwork and enhances collaboration and communication between team members. It encourages a culture of transparency, shared responsibility, and faster feedback as a foundation of a successful and high-performing team.
With DevOps principles, your teams are:
Encouraged to collaborate and share resources.
Motivated to create and deliver more value to customers.
Responsible for meeting the quality and timeliness of deliverables.
Working together to improve productivity more efficiently.
DevOps Best Practices
There are DevOps key practices that help your business innovate faster by automating and streamlining your software development and infrastructure management processes.
The following are the DevOps best practices:
Continuous Integration
Continuous integration (CI) is a DevOps practice of automating the integration of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project.
CI allows your developers to frequently merge their code changes into a central repository where automated builds and tests are executed.
CI helps your team find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
Here are some of the benefits of continuous integration:
It enables your business to scale.
It improves the feedback loop.
It enhances communication.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery (CD) is another DevOps practice that expands continuous integration (CI) by deploying your code changes automatically to a testing or production environment after the build stage.
When implemented properly, your developers will always have a deployment-ready build fragment that passes through a standardized test process.
With CD, your software deployment becomes an effortless event that can be performed at any time.
Continuous delivery adds value to your business as it improves the velocity, productivity, and sustainability of your software development team.
Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure as code (IaC) defines your system resources and topologies in a descriptive manner that enables your team to manage those resources as they would code.
IaC helps your team deploy system resources in a reliable, repeatable, and controlled way. IaC also helps you automate deployment and reduce the risk of human error.
Here are some of the benefits of IaC:
Automation
Team collaboration
Speed and efficiency
It reduces technical debt.
It can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines.
Microservices
Microservices architecture is the design approach of building a single application as a collection of smaller services deployed and operated independently from each other.
Microservices support the DevOps approach of breaking large, complex projects into smaller, manageable pieces.
With microservices architecture, different services can be worked on independently without affecting the entire system.
Microservices also support other DevOps practices such as continuous integration and delivery to ensure quick and steady/consistent deployment.
The following are the advantages of microservices:
Horizontal scaling.
Independent team execution.
Deeper focus on quality.
Monitoring and Logging
Continuous monitoring (CM) is an automated process that helps your DevOps team in the early detection of compliance issues that occur at different stages of your DevOps process.
Active monitoring becomes increasingly important as your application and infrastructure update frequency increases. CM enables you to create alerts or perform real-time analysis of the data to help your team more proactively monitor your services.
DevOps continuous monitoring aims to:
Enhance transparency and visibility of your IT and network operations.
Monitor software operation performance issues and identify the cause of the error.
Track user behavior especially after an update to a particular site.
Continuous monitoring offers the following benefits to your business:
Better network visibility and transparency.
Facilitates rapid responses.
Minimizes system downtime.
Assists healthy business performance.
Steps to Create Your DevOps Implementation Roadmap
Once you have decided to implement DevOps in your company, you need to create a step-by-step plan to smoothly shift to the DevOps approach. Following are the six simple steps to create your DevOps implementation roadmap:
1. Set Your DevOps Goals and Objectives
As you build your DevOps roadmap, the very first thing you need to do is gather all your stakeholders. Clearly explain to them that your teams are moving toward a DevOps culture.
Work with them to identify and list down all your DevOps goals and objectives that are related to the current project. This helps your team to be aware of the changes that are coming, gather support, and provide measurable results.
2. Develop Your DevOps Strategy
In the next step, you need to create your DevOps strategy. To successfully build an effective DevOps strategy, you should apply the DevOps best practices that improve your teams' collaboration and enables new ways of infrastructure provisioning, software development, and testing.
Set a common goal for your team to accelerate your software development cycle and ensure the delivery of high-quality software. Your DevOps strategy should also include a monitoring plan.
3. Apply Containerization
After developing your DevOps strategy, you can start to utilize containerization. Containerization means making some parts of your software completely independent of the rest of the infrastructure. Containers like Docker include everything required to run an application, for example, all the dependencies, libraries, and configuration files.
Containerization using a tool like Docker helps you ensure that all your developers use the same environment configuration. This helps the operations team to easily manage the application of minor changes required in one of its microservices.
4. Integrate CI/CD Tools with Your Infrastructure Automation
The knowledge of the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) process is significant for the DevOps approach. Integrating CI/CD pipeline into your infrastructure with the help of CI/CD and automation tools is one of the most important steps.
CI/CD integration should be carefully managed for faster and more efficient software testing and releases. There are popular tools for CI/CD that you can use such as Jenkins, GitLab, and GitHub Actions.
5. Enforce Automation Testing and QA-Dev Alignment
At this point, automated testing should be ensured to achieve faster delivery with DevOps. However, you are not required to automate all your test types. You can still choose to keep for instance your usability and security testing to be performed manually.
Quality assurance and development alignment should be put into place to ensure the high quality of the product during development. This alignment enables the team to detect and fix bugs earlier before the software release.
6. Monitor Your Application Performance
Application performance monitoring provides transparency to the DevOps processes. This enables you to detect, prioritize, and isolate application defects before end users find them.
You can use some performance metrics such as speed, quality, crash rate, and feedback to help you measure the progress of the project easily.
You can also use special application monitoring software like Nagios, Splunk, Prometheus, and Zabbix to help you find the root causes of the errors quickly.
Takeaways
When your teams work together, the productivity of your business improves. As a result, revenues are higher. Adopting DevOps can turn out to be valuable for your business, provided you implement it wisely. Understand the DevOps concepts and practices in detail and educate your team well about them.
Looking for professionals to help you with your DevOps implementation. We can help.
