In recent years, DevOps has moved from a niche approach to a mainstream necessity for businesses aiming to stay competitive. As companies strive to improve the speed and quality of their software delivery, DevOps has emerged as a key strategy to bridge the gap between development and operations teams, fostering collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement.
Today, industry leaders like IBM, Microsoft, and Atlassian have championed adopting DevOps practices, recognizing their positive impact on their software development lifecycles. DevOps enables organizations to deploy updates faster, minimize errors, and quickly adapt to market demands. However, despite its growing popularity, DevOps also presents certain challenges that business leaders need to consider when deciding how to implement it effectively.
In this blog, we’ll delve into the business benefits of adopting DevOps, and explore how this methodology can enhance customer satisfaction, streamline processes, and build a culture of collaboration within your organization.
Why is DevOps needed?
The SDLC approach was performed sequentially in the early days, from gathering requirements to design, development, testing, and deployment. However, today, many organizations follow Agile methodology, diving projects into sprints that come live within 2-3 weeks.
Agile aims to deliver fast projects without compromising quality. So, it becomes important for the development team to adapt DevOps practices.
According to an Atlassian report, 99% of companies claim that DevOps has positively impacted their business operations. These same companies also claim that switching to a DevOps model helped them improve product quality by 61% and deployment frequency by 49%.
Every deliverable in every sprint is automatically tested using code coverage and linting tools under the DevOps methodology. Similarly, code coverage tools assist the development team in determining the quantity of bugs in their product.
Because the development and operations teams can operate independently under the traditional software development model, the DevOps approach is required. To guarantee that the development and operations teams are in sync, the DevOps methodology is necessary.
The DevOps approach is more concerned with automating code deployment than the traditional SDLC approach. Furthermore, no human intervention is involved.
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Benefits of DevOps for your business
Now that we’ve covered the need for DevOps, let’s go into more detail about the advantages of implementing these practices.
1. Effective management process
Managers and team leads have an easier time at work when they apply the DevOps strategy. Your operations and development teams will work together harmoniously under the DevOps awning, saving you the headache as a product or project manager.
Because everyone is operating from the same centralized playbook, managers will have an easier time resolving conflicts even when teams disagree on the best strategy for a given product. Most significantly, managers can enhance task scheduling, reporting, and feedback processing with contemporary automation tools. Overall, this reduces redundancies and bottlenecks that can clog the pipeline for the delivery of products.
2. Enhanced customer focus
Customers have the power to make or break your business, as you are already aware. Providing their customers with the highest level of satisfaction is always the top priority for businesses. After two weeks, customers can receive high-quality, tested products thanks to the adoption of DevOps practices.
Furthermore, the DevOps methodology guarantees cooperative efforts between the operations and development teams, offering a feedback loop mechanism to detect bugs in the early phases of development. To make sure that developers and end users agree, feedback loops are required.
By implementing DevOps practices in software processes, products are delivered more quickly, which increases customer satisfaction. Moreover, DevOps uses continuous integration and delivery, which automatically tests and releases software or applications.
Consequently, you will gain a competitive advantage faster the more quickly you respond to customer needs.
3. Faster delivery of the solutions
In the current tech environment, companies that want to remain competitive must focus on speed as a key component. The DevOps culture will assist your company in accelerating release and deployment times by eliminating roadblocks such as dysfunctional feedback loops and conflicts across departments.
By using automation technologies to streamline procedures, you can also raise output and frequency of releases. Companies that can address bugs and release updates more quickly will always have an advantage over their competitors.
4. Focus on continuous delivery and integration (CI/CD)
Software development practices such as continuous integration involve merging codebase changes into a single central repository. By using this technique, QA engineers and developers can find bugs more quickly, which cuts down on the time needed to fix them and release updated versions.
Similar to this, continuous delivery entails the automatic development, testing, and release of code modifications. Your company will always have artifacts prepared for deployment because continuous integration (CD) pushes the code automatically to testing and standardization.
As a result, your product will be able to avoid any roadblocks that might slow down delivery when your organization implements CI/CD practices throughout the development lifecycle.
5. Improved departmental collaboration
As previously stated, a primary advantage of implementing DevOps techniques is that they promote departmental cooperation and communication.
A strong, two-way feedback system serves as the foundation for the transparent, trusting culture that permeates every high-achieving team. This close cooperation also creates harmony in the workplace, which promotes a respectful culture.
Adopting a DevOps mindset will also guarantee that your teams can collaborate on issues to produce a user-friendly product, thanks to the assistance of contemporary communication and collaboration tools like Slack, JIRA, and Teams.
6. Highly motivated teams
By embracing a DevOps culture, businesses can create a welcoming workplace that values open communication, strong teamwork, and respect. The team morale in these kinds of workplaces is consistently high.
Unplanned work is another factor that lowers team morale when they are working on a product. Unplanned work, as used in DevOps terminology, includes all optimization procedures as well as extraordinary project modifications not included in the initial project plan. For instance, the developer’s time spent resolving a bug is classified as unplanned work.
Without a doubt, implementing a proactive approach to handling unforeseen tasks can improve team morale. Your engineers and developers will also be more receptive to the DevOps methodology as a result of working more efficiently and quickly.
7. Advanced automation tools
The toolchain you have available to you has a major impact on the success of your DevOps strategy. Every tool or technology used by the development and operations teams throughout the software lifecycle is included in this toolchain.
Development tools for testing, feedback, risk management, logging, deployment, and continuous integration and delivery are all included in DevOps automation. Take into account enhancing your toolchain with these automation tools:
- Monitoring (AppDynamics, Splunk, Opsgenie, Nagios, Dynatrace, and SignalFx)
- Security (IriusRisk, PMD, CheckStyle, Halo, Gerrit, Phabricator, Imperva Rasp, and Alert Logic)
- Testing (SecApp suite, OWASP ZAP, IBM AppScan, Ranorex, BDD Automated Security Tests, AccellQ, and GAUNTLT)
- Development (Terraform, Chef, Ansible, Chef, Docker, and Kubernetes)
- The deployment of AWS CodePipeline, Tripwire, Falco, DataDog, and Osquery
- Continuous Integration and Delivery (AWS, Zephy, Jenkins, Bitbucket, SonarSource, IBM)
8. Enhanced client satisfaction
The DevOps model depends on input from stakeholders, clients, and customers in addition to internal teams. When developing a new product, companies can gauge customer sentiment thanks to this open feedback loop.
Assuming that your payment app is ready to go through the development process, a DevOps approach can assist you in maintaining communication with the app’s intended user base throughout its entire lifecycle. You will be able to address issues by implementing updates and new features by doing this.
The app’s final version will ultimately satisfy the time-to-market requirements and primary pain points of your target audience, making it appealing to them.
9. More time to innovate
By utilizing process automation, research data, and individual expertise, DevOps promotes innovation. Each of these factors influences the ultimate product’s quality.
Additionally, quick software delivery gives your company the flexibility to fail quickly and make the necessary adjustments while still meeting the original release deadline. Your developers will thus have the opportunity to test out new functionalities and architectural elements for the product.
Above all, keeping the feedback loop open helps QA engineers analyze and address concerns about software errors and other potential vulnerabilities by lowering the mean time to response (MTTR).
While these benefits highlight the potential of DevOps, seeing it in action makes all the difference. Here’s how a leading American airline leveraged DevOps to revolutionize its operations and achieve remarkable results.
Implementing DevOps: A Case Study on Transforming Airline Operations
In our recent project with a leading American airline, People10 was tasked with modernizing its software development and deployment processes through a comprehensive DevOps strategy. The airline faced several critical challenges, including slow deployment cycles, environment discrepancies, limited collaboration, and a lack of automation. These issues led to inefficiencies, delayed feature releases, and increased error rates.
Our tailored approach addressed these challenges through:
- CI/CD Pipelines: Implemented robust pipelines to automate the build, test, and deployment processes, resulting in faster and more reliable software releases.
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Leveraged tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation to manage and provision infrastructure consistently across environments.
- Automated Testing: Integrated automated testing frameworks to ensure thorough validation of code quality at every stage of development.
- Enhanced Monitoring and Collaboration: Improved real-time monitoring with tools like Prometheus and Grafana and fostered a collaborative culture between development and operations teams.
These measures led to significantly faster time to market, improved software reliability, and increased operational efficiency.
To explore the full details of this transformative project and understand how these solutions can be applied to your organization, read the entire case study here.
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Conclusion: Unlocking DevOps benefits with People10
At People10, our DevOps services are designed to drive exceptional performance and agility for your business. Our team is proficient in Scrum, Kanban, and CI/CD practices, ensuring timely delivery and adherence to project deadlines.
We are committed to delivering top-notch DevOps solutions through meticulous code reviews, rigorous testing, and strict compliance with HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR standards.
Embracing DevOps with People10 will accelerate your product releases, foster a culture of innovation, and yield significant benefits, including increased ROI, enhanced customer satisfaction, and improved employee performance.
Leverage the insights from this blog and partner with People10 to implement a transformative DevOps model that drives success for your organization.
Author
Kamal Chauhan excels in DevOps and automation, focusing on infrastructure and application deployment solutions. He designs and implements automated deployment pipelines for diverse applications and sectors.