DevOps can be termed as a set of practices that promote collaboration between the Development, Testing and Operations team in an organisation, to deploy applications and services in production faster and in a streamlined manner. Hence, DevOps is the key to the success of an organisation.
TechBeacon cites that leading companies such as Facebook, Adobe, Netflix, and Sony Pictures Entertainment have attained tangible business and technical benefits.
Here are the top five reasons why DevOps is needed
Automation of Delivery Processes
DevOps approach focuses on standardizing the development environment and automating delivery processes so that both the Development and Operations teams can deliver high quality software and manage reliable infrastructure in production with increased speed. The collaboration resulting in sharing of tools and processes between teams enables the teams to deliver the required changes quickly and keep the platform secure and available to meet the business needs and customer demand in today’s dynamic world.
TechBeacon states that Amazon witnessed increased deployment frequency with its engineers deploying code every 11.7 seconds on an average, after it moved to Amazon Web Services cloud.
A stable operating environment and shorter development cycles lead to faster innovation for an enterprise.
Increased Visibility of Infrastructure Requirement
Tight coupling between the developers and Operations team ensures that developers provide inputs on redundancy, projection about failover and storage requirements. According to 2017 State of DevOps Report, this helps the Operations team to provide scalable infrastructure, reliable and fast disaster recovery, reduced deployment failure and rollover, and maintain data centre locations, thus giving increased customer satisfaction. It also allows for simultaneous deployment across different platforms.
According to a recent survey in Rackspace.com, 52% of DevOps users saw an increase in customer satisfaction, 43% users have experienced improved customer engagement and 38% users witnessed a sales increase.
Improved Performance and Productivity of Teams
Increased communication and collaboration lead to better productivity and happy teams, as it enhances the software development culture as well as saves time. The culture focuses on improved performance rather than individual goals, understanding of each other’s processes and accountability from both Development and Operation teams, allowing seamless process integration as all team members work towards a common goal.The tools and techniques adopted in DevOps allow parallel workflows to be implemented in the continuous development chain to avoid delays when one team waits for another to complete work.
According to TechBeacon, Sony Pictures Entertainment has reduced its delivery time from few months to minutes, during the release of its software to manage entertainment assets for its end users, using the continuous delivery model of DevOps.
Business Agility and Business Value
As companies increasingly lean on cloud infrastructure, it becomes crucial to implement DevOps principles. DevOps helps the organisation to market its services and products at a faster rate, thereby gaining a competitive advantage over its competitors. Furthermore, the principles ensure scalable business for an enterprise. The practices also enable an organisation to be flexible in balancing its capacity as per demand fluctuations and be more agile in terms of product complexity and time.
Wall Street Journal quotes that Adobe has been able to meet 60 percent more app development demand.
Another integral benefit of DevOps is that it also integrates security into the software development processes.
Reduced Overall Costs
Implementing DevOps methodology reduces overall operational costs and IT staff requirements due to better productivity from staff and optimal resource utilisation. According to Red Hat, development teams require 35 percent less IT staff and 30 percent lower IT costs. The continuous delivery model improves the product or process quality, thereby reduced production failures and infrastructure failures lead to cost savings. Network downtime costs are avoided since DevOps provides efficient code with its automated testing, continuous integration and continuous delivery practices. It also brings down the software release costs.
As per TechBeacon, Fidelity Worldwide Investment has avoided spending $2.3 million when it adopted DevOps approach for launching a critical trading application.
Thus, business and technology developments have become the key drivers to implement DevOps practices. DevOps philosophy aids to evolve and improve products at a rapid rate, serve customers better and compete effectively in the market.
To adopt DevOps strategy, the organisation faces a few challenges such as the need to promote a shift in the work culture to embrace new methods and tools, refine skill set of people performing deployment and testing, establish common operational procedures and standardized processes and switch from legacy infrastructure.
To reap the benefits of DevOps in your organisation, you need a flexible, cost-effective and reliable outsourcing partner who can improve your workflow and productivity, and deliver business value. AgilizTech’s team of competent DevOps experts and innovative consulting services help you to scale your business, decide on where to invest on resources and boost business growth.
