DevOps is an evolving customer-centric philosophy that fuses development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to optimize the software development lifecycle.
According to McKinsey Consulting, DevOps models can reduce time to market by 50-75 percent, increase capacity by 25-30 percent, and reduce failure rates by 50 percent. Read on to learn more benefits of DevOps and what organizations can expect by integrating its philosophy, tools, and practices into their software development lifecycle.
DevOps is Critical to Modern Software Development
DevOps practices promote continuous collaboration and communication between software development teams and their IT operations counterparts. Without the virtual walls dividing the two, DevOps fosters a culture where a single team shares common goals and objectives.
Continuity is at the core of DevOps by emphasizing “continuous everything” at every stage of the cycle.
Fundamental capabilities of DevOps include:
- Continuous planning
- Continuous integration
- Continuous delivery
- Continuous operations
- Continuous monitoring
- Continuous quality
- Continuous security
- Continuous collaboration
- Continuous improvement
DevOps implementation has the potential to completely transform how teams plan, code, build, integrate, deploy, and monitor applications. Feedback loops improve processes at each phase, with numerous benefits that include:
1. DevOps Solves Many Challenges Associated with Traditional Software Development
DevOps practices streamline processes throughout the entire software development lifecycle to address challenges that include:
- Inefficient processes
- Delayed IT infrastructure implementation
- Lack of automation
- Poor communication
- Employee frustration
- Delayed software updates
- Inefficient testing processes
- Slow software delivery
- Delayed bug fixing
- Reduced software quality
- Dissatisfied users
2. DevOps Eliminates Silos
DevOps emerged as a response to the traditional software development model that divided individuals that wrote code from those that deployed and supported that code. Sometimes these teams had disconnected goals, separate leadership, and different performance metrics that led to silos which ultimately affected the end product.
DevOps aims to reverse that trend by fusing departments under interdependent responsibilities within the production environment. By creating a set of practices that foster constant collaboration, DevOps removes silos to unite development, operations, and security teams under the same customer-centric goals.
3. DevOps Enables Frequent Releases
Technology moves fast. DevOps keeps up with the speed of innovation with practices that help teams release high-quality deliverables quicker and with greater stability.
DevOps leverages real-time data to inform your team of all events occurring throughout various phases of the cycle. This data gives critical insights into the performance of systems, helping engineers quickly understand how code changes impact application performance. DevOps additionally speeds up resolution times by enabling teams to solve problems together instead of sending issues to separate departments.
4. DevOps Leverages Automation
DevOps automation facilitates feedback between development and operations teams to deploy updates faster.
Provisioning and deploying updates can be time-consuming and complex within the DevOps environment. An Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach that leverages automation enables the delivery of pre-approved resources and configurations with minimal human intervention.
Software developers additionally require IT resources to create, test, and deploy updates, applications, and services. Providing these resources manually can result in delays throughout the release pipeline, resulting in slower development.
IT teams can deliver resources faster through DevOps tools that combine automation with application programming interface (API)-centric design. By speeding up the process, automation additionally helps IT departments quickly support proofs of concept, continuous testing, and deployment.
5. DevOps Helps Teams Manage Unexpected Work
Work outside the normal flow can lead to disorganization and decreased productivity. DevOps provides a framework with established processes that helps managers prioritize tasks, giving individuals the direction required to better balance planned and unplanned work.
6. DevOps Resolves Incidents and Outages Faster
Mean time to recovery (MTTR) is a powerful metric measuring how fast teams resolve incidents. Rapid feedback loops, complete visibility, and continuous communication enable DevOps teams to resolve issues quickly and minimize downtime. DevOps additionally improves MTTR by leveraging automation to reduce errors and minimize outages from occurring in the first place.
7. DevOps Culture Builds Collaboration and Trust
The traditional software development environment typically divides teams. As a result, there is reduced transparency, differing priorities, and the tendency to push issues to other departments when they are beyond the scope of specified duties.
DevOps remedies that issue by creating dependencies between groups and improving visibility. This builds a culture of “systems thinking” based on shared responsibility, transparency, and trust.
8. DevOps Continuously Improves Applications to Increase Customer Satisfaction
DevOps enables continuous improvement at every phase of the software lifecycle through feedback loops between teams that continuously optimize the application. In addition to increasing software performance, DevOps minimizes waste, reduces costs, boosts speed, and optimizes delivery.
9. DevOps Unites Your Entire Team Under a Single Customer-Focused Mission
DevOps fosters a culture of customer-centric thinking that encourages teams to consider how every action in the software development process affects end users.
Strategies that help put the customer in focus include:
- User stories to demonstrate how each unit of work in the framework impacts the customer
- Impact mapping that breaks down project goals into subgoals that detail how every action within the cycle connects to the main goal
10. DevOps Ultimately Improves Software Features to Enhance the Customer Experience and Drive Profits
DevOps philosophy, tools, and practices ultimately produce better software that improves the user experience. Popularity increases as a result, leading to more downloads and increased profitability.
DevOps Consulting Unlocks Additional Benefits
Many organizations face gridlock when deploying releases due to poor organizational structure and siloed teams. Professional consulting by a reputable DevOps company can quickly help teams overcome issues and fast-track projects to their full potential.
Applications are complex, and every team is different. By leveraging extensive experience from various projects, DevOps consultants can quickly identify issues and prescribe precision strategies to optimize your development environment.
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Maximize the potential of your application with DevOps consulting by Moonswitch. Our DevOps services leverage decades of experience to help you plan, execute, and monitor a customer-centric strategy that aligns with your organization’s goals.
