Today, DevOps is one of the most influential trends in software development. And the number of organizations that have incorporated DevOps has been increasing exponentially every year. The adoption of a DevOps approach is crucial for companies that aim to stay competitive in the market while maintaining control over product quality and velocity. In 2020, Atlassian conducted a survey in which 99% of respondents stated that DevOps implementation positively impacted their organizations. However, this is not surprising since it provides numerous technical and business benefits.
DevOps is neither just a process nor a set of tools. It is a culture, methodology, structure, and whole philosophy that changes the way how teams collaborate to achieve business goals. Dive deeper into the concept of DevOps and its benefits for cloud transformation by reading further in this article.
DevOps goes far beyond increasing production efficiency. It optimizes the business as a whole, establishing communication between different teams, putting processes in order, and transforming the workplace culture. Its importance is manifested primarily in the reliable, fast, and secure delivery of business value to customers. DevOps encourages continuous improvement and drives business innovation. Companies that implement DevOps practices bring their products to market faster and more frequently, with fewer bugs.
DevOps is about the union between development and operations teams based on a desire to achieve the best performance. A transparent culture with immediate and guaranteed feedback makes processes more fluid. DevOps also promotes smooth performance, speed, and quality in app development, enabling businesses to stay competitive. But the best way to highlight the importance of implementing DevOps is by discussing its benefits.
Below are the most frequently used DevOps practices and tools, which are based on the concept of continuous improvement and automation.
So, as mentioned above, there are multiple advantages of the DevOps model. Our list covers only some of the major ones and explains how each benefit of DevOps can positively impact business workflows.
Companies have long recognized the importance of coexistence among Dev, Ops, and QA teams. However, they often failed to prioritize the promotion of collaboration between them. Today, the introduction of the DevOps culture brings about a transformative shift in cross-departmental collaboration. It creates an environment where different teams involved in the release process no longer operate in isolation but collaborate together throughout the DevOps lifecycle to achieve common objectives. By shifting away from department-specific goals, barriers between teams are removed, resulting in a value-driven approach for the company. Consequently, it helps to generate enhanced value for customers.
So this means that all engineers, developers, and managers share the responsibility for the end product. Otherwise, a lack of shared goals can lead to inconsistency and negative effects on the software development process. The DevOps environment motivates people from various teams to collaborate, brainstorm, and develop strategies for workflow improvement. Moreover, it allows employees to broaden and enhance their skills in areas that go beyond specialization. Multidisciplinary knowledge balances the workflow across the operations team and boosts productivity.
Speed is a fundamental element of competitive advantage. DevOps adoption accelerates the pace at which organizations generally operate. The quicker company releases the product, the faster it can benefit from the business value embedded within its features. A lack of automated testing slows down the release. With DevOps tools that drive automation, teams increase productivity and release quality software more frequently, with fewer bugs.
DevOps requires the development team to monitor the product for updates or bugs throughout its entire life cycle. Continuous integration and continuous delivery practices streamline software development, assisting developers in quickly identifying and fixing bugs. It allows businesses to accelerate time-to-resolution and then time-to-market.
DevOps paves the way for innovations. Rapid software delivery frees specialists’ time, enabling them to dedicate it to brainstorming, experimenting with new ideas, and enhancing the effectiveness of ongoing projects. DevOps empowers teams to modify existing processes, simplify operational workflows and create alternatives, leading to the birth of business innovations.
DevOps not only drives innovations but also cultivates such an environment where strict rules no longer limit developers. Teams can perform proof of their concepts with a minimum break from current projects. They start to understand the needs of their clients better. Thus, DevOps provides the necessary space required for successful application development.
Given the ever-changing market trends and customers’ demands, companies need to be agile enough to adapt quickly and stay competitive. DevOps enables businesses to achieve the necessary agility. It allows application development teams to rebuild processes in response to sudden changes without slowing down and disrupting the current ones.
DevOps assists in understanding customers, including how they use products and what their preferences are. This enables businesses to respond faster to requirements with capacity balancing depending on fluctuations in demand. And as a result, clients continuously receive new software features that meet their needs and provide benefits to them. Moreover, agile software development methodologies shorten release cycles and ensure faster time-to-market.
DevOps practices impact software quality in several ways. We have already discussed the importance of open communication and collaboration between siloed teams. In such an environment, engineers collectively share responsibility, actively exchange knowledge among DevOps teams, and collaborate towards shared goals, resulting in improved build quality.
DevOps also transforms the traditional testing process, making it a crucial component throughout the application development lifecycle. Such practices as continuous testing, test environment management, automated testing, and exploratory testing, integrated into the DevOps workflow, help to achieve faster delivery of high-quality software.
In addition to speed and quality, software products also need security. In the face of constant growth in cybercrime rates, there is an ever-present risk of data breaches that can result in significant financial losses. And this is a task for DevSecOps.
DevSecOps is a set of practices that involve integrating security testing at every stage of the software development lifecycle. This means that everyone (not just security specialists) is responsible for the security aspect of the application. Such collaboration between development, security, and operations teams enables the building of efficient and secure software. With DevSecOps, companies save time and reduce costs. This is because continuous monitoring and detection of security issues at the early stages of the development process are always cheaper and faster than after software release. DevSecOps practices also support continuous iterative improvements to streamline the security process. As a result, it affects the speed of recovery in case of any incidents.
Nothing is more critical to business than meeting customer expectations. To minimize costs, companies should prioritize the satisfaction of existing clients because attracting new ones is much more expensive. Companies that have adopted DevOps have different tools to improve the quality of service and, eventually, customer satisfaction.
Feedback loops are an essential component of performance improvement and process optimization. They enable customers to track the progress at various stages and make suggestions. A continuous cycle of customer feedback helps development and operations teams ensure they are on the same wavelength as the client.
The long wait for results has a negative effect on overall customer satisfaction. But as mentioned above, DevOps speeds up the pace of application development and streamlines operations workflows. Thus, clients receive software faster at a lower price compared to competitors who didn’t adopt DevOps.
This list of key benefits of DevOps wouldn’t be complete without expense cutting. In fact, all advantages mentioned above directly or indirectly contribute to it. With a comprehensive DevOps strategy, companies can significantly cut production and administration costs. And there are different ways to achieve significant expense reduction through the DevOps process.
The financial impact of outages can be catastrophic, especially for projects at launch. Some of the most common causes of downtimes include bug-ridden code, overloaded infrastructure, and poor service visibility. CI, CD, and automated testing help development teams minimize network downtime. With DevOps tools, developers identify and fix bugs early in the process., resulting in better-performing software code.
Moreover, application performance monitoring tools provide better visibility that helps to control and track changes. All stakeholders involved in the release can access comprehensive information about the code and its potential impact on end users. Detailed recordings also help to identify the root cause of issues.
In order to stay competitive, business needs to release the software quickly. However, dealing with multiple simultaneous releases can be costly and complex for companies. DevOps processes automate the release pipeline, reducing manpower and therefore cutting costs.
DevOps promotes the utilization of cloud computing and optimization techniques. Scalable and elastic cloud infrastructure provides the capability to allocate resources as needed. Thus, companies avoid over-provisioning and pay only for actual usage, optimizing infrastructure costs.
The list of DevOps benefits is impressive. It transforms the workplace culture, encourages better application development, delivers value in the early stages of a project, and contributes to increased customer satisfaction. However, the DevOps journey is full of challenges and largely depends on the success of implementation. And to get the most out of the benefits of DevOps, you need a reliable partner.
With Limestone Digital, you can develop faster, better, and safer. Our DevOps engineers create custom deployment plans that will support, secure, and evolve your development process. Book a free consultation with our expert to learn more about how DevOps culture can change the operation of your business.
