Introduction
Implementing DevOps best practices and workflows helps organizations save time and money, increase SDLC predictability, create an innovation-based corporate culture and sustain high levels of motivation.
So, what exactly is DevOps? DevOps implies an agile, collaborative relationship between development and IT operations teams. So, DevOps is actually an attitude, not a mere defined process or role. It is actually about identifying ways to expand cross-functional transparency and collaboration — and with continuous improvement at the core, which goes on incessantly like a journey. In DevOps, developers are held liable for the code they write and for taking on-call duties. When DevOps culture is adopted as a cross-functional practice across different teams, it has the ability to completely change the way code is delivered, uptime is maintained, and incidents are managed.
A DevOps culture begins with several teams comprising members from multiple disciplines continuously building and deploying new features and services. Product managers, QA engineers, mobile developers, and operations engineers can all be on one sub-team of a DevOps-focused team. In an organization following DevOps practices, engineers are responsible for maintaining the code they write, implying that they’ll resolve incidents with more efficacy, and take greater care about creating reliability into everything they build.
Industries That Devops Drives Business Value
DevOps principles, workflows, and best practices can be applied in several industries and they provide impactful results for any business – large, medium or small. However, significant decision such as DevOps transformation cannot be made unanimously by the CEO. The CTO, CIO, and VP of engineering should also be taken into confidence on this issue, as the process of DevOps implementation encompasses multiple departments and influences the entire workflow in the organization. DevOps can drive business value for several industries including, but not limited to, eCommerce, travel, finance, insurance, and healthcare, to name a few.
How DevOps Drives Your Business Value
Practicing DevOps as an organizational culture helps you get the latest, practical answers to key business questions:
1. How do you improve product delivery to your customers?
2. How do your change product more swiftly to better satisfy your customers?
3. How do you recover after losing your customers’ trust?
4. How do you get quick payment from your customers?
All of these directly impact sales, revenue growth, profitability, product line, business viability, and customer satisfaction — all of which have direct relation to business investment.
Several studies reveal that DevOps organizations have an almost extraordinary advantage of 30x the deploy frequency of their non-DevOps peers. To put in other words, if you are not adopting DevOps vis-à-vis someone who is, then they can, on average, do what you do, but do it 30 times (30x) faster than you.
Source: www.compaid.co.in
To know how DevOps drive business value, answer this fundamental question: How long does it take your organization to put a single, new line of code into production? For many organizations, the answer would be in months. For DevOps-practicing organizations, the answer usually is as long as just a fortnight to as short as an hour. So, imagine the competitive advantage for an organization which is competing in hours vs. months! That is a tremendous and vast difference in a competitive world. If your competitor takes months to deliver something to his customer that you can deliver in an hour, then it’s good, but what if it’s your organization that takes months vis-à-vis your competitor, who delivers it in just an hour? They have even quantified the difference. The DevOps-powered organizations have a 200x swifter lead time over their non-practicing peers. So, not only do DevOps organizations repeat in production far more quickly, they can move to production even swifter than that.
DevOps helps drive business value to your organization in several ways. Here are six of them:
1. DevOps Helps Save Time and Money
Several IT operations are routine and repetitive tasks. Most of them can be automated using scripts, but if the scenario varies, the script fails — and the scenarios in production differ quite a lot. Implementing DevOps principles of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Delivery (CD) help ensure the uniformity of task scenarios and infrastructure immutability, so automation becomes 100% effective and greatly aids shrink the amount of time and effort spent on routine and repetitive tasks.
Source: www.compaid.co.in
2. DevOps Enhances Predictability of Software Lifecycle
Several times you might have experienced delayed projects due to ‘critical bugs that were discovered just prior to the release’ or the eleventh-hour need to implement some security checks. It was a sad reality that impeded the software delivery for several years before the DevOps paradigm was introduced. Now, security checks are embedded in the automated unit and integrity testing is done from the very beginning and the code is written in short chunks that are continuously integrated into the primary project trunk, instead of building long branches that fail to merge later down the track. Thus, working under DevOps methodology thoroughly reduces the possibility of eleventh-hour issues and vastly enhances the predictability and outcomes of the software development projects.
3. DevOps Helps Create a Corporate ‘Culture of Innovation’
Experimentation is at the heart of improvement and innovation. However, when system re-configuration is a long and laborious task and somebody has to pay for this time — the cost of error is too exorbitant. This is a standard problem for several traditional infrastructures — they are full of grey areas nobody dares to venture to and it is impossible to rectify or better what happens there. When the price of an error is losing your job, you would think twice before even suggesting altering something.
DevOps engineers operate virtualized infrastructures, where servers are managed like cattle, not pets. They can be maintained, operated, and shut down in just a few seconds, with almost zero costs, compared to tedious manual configuration. The cost of error is almost nil, and the failure of some idea is not someone’s fault — it is merely an indicator that the system can be bettered. Therefore, at the end of the day, DevOps engineers don’t ask, “Who suggested this crazy idea and how do we come out of it?” Instead, they ask, “What did we learn from this today and how do we better the system to avoid such failures in the future?” DevOps culture nourishes creativity and experimentation — and does not find ways to attribute guilt to someone.
4. DevOps Culture Helps Employees Stay Motivated
It is a logical that when you have the freedom to experiment and try something new with virtually zero negative consequences – since the testing and staging systems are deployed in seconds and literally at zero cost — you are free to innovate. Developers are motivated to write clean code, instead of adopting shortcuts that later lead to technical debt. Specialists are always enthusiastic to learn something new and play with the latest versions of tools they use in order to find novel ways to enhance the product and their workflows. The teams are able to acquire and share lots of experience swiftly, so the specialists grow professionally very rapidly, instead of being stuck with the same processes and tools for years, languishing and losing motivation.
5. DevOps Drives Enhanced Organizational Performance
DevOps is significant because it determines your organization’s software delivery process, which, in turn, influences its software delivery performance. And software delivery performance drives organizational performance. In the First Way of DevOps – Systems Thinking – organizations work to understand the software delivery process, make it renewable and safe with powerful automation, and maximize it by eliminating low value work. This is DevOps. These delivery process improvements directly enhance the software’s deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and alter failure rate.
In the Second Way, organizations also monitor how their software operates in production and employ feedback to enhance it. The blend of operational and delivery improvements enhances the software’s time to repair during the occurrence of a problem.
6. DevOps Improves Quality of Life of Employees & Their Retention
Stress or burnout is a common and serious issue in technical and software organizations. A few of the noted symptoms of burnout are exhaustion, cynicism, and feelings of inefficacy. Burnout causes pain at work and home and may lead to employee attrition in the organization.
DevOps addresses work overload by recognizing and maximizing the flow of change (value) through the system. As part of the First Way, practitioners identify the work required to shift changes through the system. This work can now be managed and prioritized as independent elements. The team can focus on the high value work, identify manual operations that can be substituted with safer, strong automated ones, and discard low-value work. Further, the team can adopt practices such as work-in-progress limits to optimize throughput and provide backpressure on the infinite stream of requests. People acquire more control over their routine work as their feedback is embedded into the plan for the team’s day-to-day work and strategic improvement plan. The planning process should allocate 20% of its time to improve the team’s processes for doing its work (or more, if things are in bad shape). These first steps set a foundation for the team to strengthen feedback loops (Second Way) and create a culture of experimentation (Third Way) that provides even more freedom.
Conclusion
DevOps practices provide great business value to organizations by enabling them to transform swiftly and safely. There is a strong and growing body of work that reveals that high-performing software delivery organizations surpass their peers by 2x or more. DevOps isn’t a specific role or a defined set of processes. It is a culture and method for continuous improvement, collaboration, and transparency to drive success and business value – success not only in creating reliable software and Agile engineering practices, but also in driving revenue and operational efficiency throughout the entire organization.
About CloudFulcrum
CloudFulcrum with its mission of “DevOps as a Service” has been part of multiple successful Copado implementations across the globe with customers in BFSI, Health Care, Retail, Real Estate, and Technology verticals.
With our DevOps consulting, we help enterprises align their Digital Transformation goals to achieve higher efficiency, faster time-to-market, and better quality of software builds with early identification of arising issues, enabling continuous release of Salesforce applications.
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