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With a lot of companies now planning to develop products faster and cut down on their release cycles, it is imperative for them to leverage new-age digital technologies such as Cloud, Mobility, IoT and many others. Out of the multiple technologies that companies can exploit, DevOps is quickly gaining traction. DevOps is enabling companies to automate their delivery pipeline and continuously integrate and deploy without any hassles.
Unlike the traditional environment where Dev and Ops used to work differently, DevOps promotes a culture of collaboration breaking the traditional silos.
According to Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx, the first and only industry analysis and advisory firm focused on Agile and Digital Transformation, “DevOps is an organizational and cultural rethink of how software-driven organizations can become nimble enough to innovate at the speed of light and implement changes that come their way rapidly.”
With the rising need of DevOps as a service, several organizations are looking to join hands with a DevOps partner that can help them automate their delivery pipeline, setup one click deployment, take care of the workload migration and support them with the overall strategy and DevOps consulting.
DevOps consulting doesn’t merely give a direction or a convention that an organization should follow but it gives every IT organization the ability to stand out in its own unique way. According to one of the Gartner’s reports, DevOps and enterprise-scale development practices will have a major impact on organizations. It also suggests that DevOps as a service helps organizations build and manage their systems and provides application leaders with insights to guide their planning processes. Some of the mature DevOps players have also started leveraging DevOps tools such as Chef, Jenkins, Puppet, Ansible and much more.
We have outlined below some of the most advanced business benefits that DevOps brings on the table.
- Improved Build Quality
DevOps is the process that binds development and operations together. DevOps creates an environment of knowledge and information sharing that lets the teams share same goals that positively impacts the build quality. DevOps compels a wide range of teams to perform regular specialized code reviews to improve code maintainability. DevOps brings together both dev-centric attributes such as features, performance, and reusability and ops-centric attributes such as deployability and maintainability to uplift the overall code quality. Several tests in the areas of distribution of deployment frequency, deployment lead time and mean time to recover (MTTR) suggest that DevOps helps in driving not only a better initial code quality but also improved testing. DevOps helps in making a mindset shift towards continuous delivery improvement that makes it a critical contributor to code quality and stability.
- Accelerated Application Delivery through Agile
DevOps leverages disciplined Agile Delivery is an established process for developing software. When we look at the traditional method of software release process, it is often observed that the development team first builds the code and then tests it in an isolated environment, where the operations team takes over for production. The lack of synchronization between the two teams creates several complexities and misunderstandings as they are not on the same page regarding infrastructure, configuration, deployment, log management, and performance monitoring, which in turn slows down the production process.
With the help of DevOps services, companies can actually accelerate delivery and cut down the release time. It helps them to go to market in desirable time and stay ahead of the competition. DevOps with Agile also helps in early detection of errors leading to quick fixes. It lets the code be in the releasable state always. Overall, DevOps helps companies to focus more on innovation with more stable operating environments.
- Improved Application Reliability
DevOps tools and principles automate the entire delivery pipeline that enables teams to diminish the pitfalls of version control, configuration management, continuous integration, deployment and continuous performance monitoring. This improves application quality as it eliminates the time-consuming, cumbersome, as well as error prone manual processes.
Automation increases application reliability as there is little manual intervention. Additionally, test automation and QA processes carried out in every stage give more control to the development team to have a foolproof QA mechanism in place. According to a recent report, several high performing IT organizations have experienced up to 60 times of fewer failure rates and 168 times faster recovery from failure. These organizations were also able to deploy 30 times more frequently with 200 times shorter lead time. According to the report, these organizations adopted DevOps and were able to integrate continuous delivery to their system.
Hence, it has been well documented and proven that through the incorporation of automation, teams are able to build, package and deploy with much more ease and accuracy. It has successfully led to a shortening of lead time, improving the mean time to recovery with much lower failure rates and downtime.
- Improved Team Collaboration
It is never truly DevOps unless it becomes intertwined with the organizational culture. In a regular IT association, both dev and operations are frequently restricted to executing their specific tasks. DevOps, therefore, aims to blur the lines between development and operations by empowering the either side to understand the other’s workflow. This warrants the teams to comprehend the entire procedure end-to-end while making improvements to it. For example; ops also start understanding dev jobs and tools and vice versa.
Living up to its Lean principles DevOps brings with itself a culture of constant learning and improvement. Moreover, as both the teams understand each other’s job and share larger goals, it also enhances the satisfaction levels. According to most DevOps consulting companies, working in isolated environments or silos can bring a lot of resentment and misunderstanding between different teams with very little transparency on either side. With both Dev and Ops team working in collaboration it helps in swift execution of projects through an Agile process and dynamically reduces bottlenecks.
- Minimized Impact of Complexity on Software Development
Many a time, the build quality is compromised due to the complexity of the project. Several software system functionalities get more and more complex as the deployment progresses. Many small software glitches can have significant consequences that can be detrimental for the software build. However, DevOps eliminates this risk by giving more control to the teams by managing smaller chunks of the software solution. It encourages the use of automated procedures to build, package and deploy the application. It is far easier to verify the interfaces, runtime dependencies with this automated support. This process helps to ensure that the configured environment is able to support all components comprehensively which includes the build and deployment of the components themselves.
Conclusion
DevOps brings an all-round growth in terms of software quality and culture. Many companies are looking for DevOps outsourcing partner that can help them to better their infrastructure with one click deployment and rollback, backups, and overall pipeline automation. A good DevOps partner that provides DevOps as a service doesn’t just stop at automation but also help to achieve significant business benefits with the configuration of automated alerts, centralized log management, infrastructure security, and disaster recovery. DevOps helps companies to become more Agile and efficient.
DevOps is certainly a sure fire way to optimize quality and improve infrastructure. Do let us know what business benefits did you receive leveraging DevOps in the comments below.
