What are the benefits of DevOps?

Published in

Agilemania

7 min readMar 4, 2022

DevOps (Development and Operations) integrates the tasks of software development teams and IT operations teams. As a result, it increases its productivity by delivering software faster than the traditional processes.

The faster the company develops the software, the better they serve their customers. This practice creates a competitive advantage for the company.

The factors DevOps emphasizes on:

Team empowerment
Cross-team communication and cooperation
Technological automation

DevOps represents a shift in the outlook of the IT culture. It focuses on incremental development and quick software delivery, based on Agile, lean principles, and systems theory.

DevOps is all about developers and operators working together and sharing responsibility for the product they create. Improved teamwork and efficiency are also critical to meeting company objectives.

DevOps eliminates the need to wait for code to be deployed and tested. As a result, the developer receives immediate feedback on the code and can fix errors and get the code ready for production faster.

DevOps implies that an IT team builds software that completely satisfies user needs, installs quickly, and operates effectively on the first attempt. Organizations achieve this purpose by combining culture and technology.

In DevOps, The Operations team is well aware of the progress made by the developers. The operations team collaborates with developers to create a monitoring plan that meets IT and business requirements.

While DevOps is not a technology, the approaches used in DevOps contexts are typically the same. The approaches are:

Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tools
Real-time monitoring and incident management tools
Cloud computing and microservices employed together with DevOps approaches

Benefits of DevOps

The DevOps approach is a way for a company to improve operational efficiency, speed delivery, and innovate products. Organizations that have adopted a DevOps culture has achieved the following benefits-

Faster product delivery
Reliability and Security
Improved Collaboration
Detect and fix risk factors promptly.
Adapt to the market and beat the competition

Challenges of DevOps

Implementing DevOps is seen as a challenge for many companies. However, facing these challenges and succeeding with innovation makes a real difference.

We have enlisted a few challenges involved in DevOps:

Expensive tools and platforms
Riskier deployment due to a fail-fast mentality
Organizational and IT departmental changes
Regulatory compliance during role separation
Unnecessary, fragile, or unsafe automation

DevOps Culture

While DevOps processes use technology to automate and optimize operations, it all starts with the culture within the organization and the people who contribute to it. Embracing a DevOps culture is key to building a high-performing engineering company without losing employee satisfaction.

The issue of promoting a DevOps culture requires significant shifts in how people work and cooperate. But on the other hand, organizations that embrace a DevOps culture foster the growth of high-performing teams.

Teams who embrace DevOps culture, methods, and technologies produce better products rapidly and provide greater customer satisfaction.

How Does DevOps Work?

DevOps is an approach to streamline work throughout the whole software development lifecycle. Under the DevOps approach, the development and operation team no longer works in their own bubble. They collaborate with each other across the whole software development process to give quick and satisfactory services to the clients.

DevOps influence the application lifecycle throughout the planning, developing, delivering, and operating phases. Each phase relies on the others, and the phases are not role-specific. These phases are explained below:

Plan — DevOps team uses the planning phase to brainstorm, define and explain the features and capabilities of the apps and systems they are developing.
Develop — DevOps team strives for quick innovation while maintaining quality, stability, and productivity.
Deliver — DevOps team defines a release management process with distinct manual approval phases. They also put up automatic gates to transport applications through different phases till they’re ready for clients.
Operate — The operation phase involves maintaining, monitoring, and debugging applications in production environments.

DevOps teams employ tools to automate and speed up operations, which improves reliability. A DevOps toolchain assists teams in tackling key DevOps principles such as collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring. These processes are explained in detail-

Collaboration

Collaboration in DevOps is very critical for the smooth development of the application and its quick delivery. Often, this means development and operations teams merge into a single team that works across the entire application lifecycle. The main idea behind DevOps is to establish trust among developers and operations.

The pillar of DevOp success is how well teams and people across the company connect together to get things done more effectively and efficiently. DevOps implies that the entire organization should function like a startup — constantly adapting to market changes and spending time and money on features that would attract more consumers.

Not just between IT and development teams, the need for collaboration extends to everyone with a stake in software delivery. Here, it means all the teams, including test, product management, and executives, should work together. Creating this inclusive, collaborative environment also involves accepting a cultural shift within the company.

Automation

One of the important principles of DevOps is automating as much of the software development process as possible. Automating workflows allows developers to focus solely on writing code and developing new features.

DevOps relies primarily on automation, and it emphasizes the use of tools (whether you build it or buy) in the software development process. In DevOps, toolchains are used to automate significant aspects of the end-to-end software development and deployment processes.

DevOps automation improves speed, consistency, accuracy, and reliability while also increasing the number of deliveries. When automation is implemented, it may serve as a basis for growing and standardizing automation throughout an organization.

With automated processes, teams achieve continuous improvement with short iteration cycles, which allows them to respond fast to client feedback.

Continuous Integration

Continuous integration is the process of combining source code updates from all team members. The merging protects a developer’s local copy of code for a project from floating too far off as new code is introduced by others. Hence, merging conflicts are avoided.

The main aim of continuous integration are listed below-

Detect and fix errors faster
Increase software quality
Reduce the time to verify and deploy new software upgrades

Developers integrate code modifications on a regular basis. They frequently communicate in order to reduce errors or any kind of conflicts. This extends beyond development teams to the rest of the organization.

Continuous integration increases productivity by relieving developers from doing manual work and promoting practices that limit the number of defects and bugs distributed to consumers.

Continuous Testing

Continuous testing means testing software at every stage of the software development lifecycle. The goal is to evaluate the quality of software at every stage by testing early and frequently.

Continuous testing helps developers in many ways such as-

Reduce application-bound risks
Brings consistency
Enables faster release
Cuts downtime took for code review

A suitable testing strategy at the initial stage of the manufacturing process provides for a speedy recovery in case of unexpected errors/bugs in the product.

Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring implies teams assess the performance and availability of software to improve stability. It helps to identify the root causes of issues quickly. Thus, it helps to prevent outages and minimize user concerns proactively.

For DevOps, two kinds of monitoring are required-

Server monitoring
Application performance monitoring

Continuous monitoring might be regarded as the final phase of the DevOps pipelines. Continuous monitoring allows businesses to observe, identify, and understand critical metrics in real-time and fix application and infrastructure issues.

Once the application has been launched and made available to users, continuous monitoring notifies the teams if there are any application issues in that environment. This will provide valuable feedback to the team and improvise the final product to meet quality standards.

DevOps Tools

The DevOps model relies on effective tooling to enable teams to quickly and consistently deploy and innovate for their customers. These tools automate laborious activities, assist teams in managing complicated settings at scale, and keep engineers in charge of DevOps’ high velocity.

Generally, DevOps professionals use a CI/CD pipeline, containers, and cloud hosting. Tools might be open source, proprietary, or supported distribution of open source technology.

There are several tools available that are specifically designed to assist DevOps cultural practices. Some of them are enlisted below-

Source code management: Git (GitLab, GitHub), Bitbucket
Configuration management: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, CFEngine
Release management: Jenkins, Travis, CircleCl, TeamCity, Gradle
Orchestration: Mesos, Zookeeper, Kubernetes
Monitoring, virtualization, containerization: Nagios, Vagrant, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes

What Problems Does DevOps Solve?

The common problem faced by each company includes delayed releases, software that falls short of expectation, and IT that limit business expansion.

A DevOps project moves faster from requirements to live software. This is because there are manual processes, lengthy reviews, or any waiting time. It addresses issues of communication and prioritization amongst IT specialties.

Development teams must understand the production environment and test their code in real situations in order to create effective software.

Companies can take advantage of market opportunities faster if the route from the idea to the development of the software is reduced. In this way, DevOps provides a competitive advantage for businesses.

Conclusion

DevOps is a people, process, and tools strategy. It is important not just for accelerating software development but also for improving software quality. It can refer to how soon a new product or feature is released to customers while maintaining the highest standards of quality and security.

DevOps brings a new mindset, agile techniques, and smart technologies to the board, all of which work together to achieve that objective. DevOps is also designed to encourage corporate innovation and continuous process improvement.

DevOps encourages the delivery of business value to an organization’s end customers to be quicker, better, and more secure. This value might result in frequent product releases, features, or upgrades.

DevOps teams remain agile by delivering software in short cycles. Shorter release cycles make planning and risk management easier since progress is incremental.

The sooner the engineering and IT organizations master DevOps. The more effectively your Business Agility goals will be met. When properly implemented, DevOps culture may provide significant benefits to enterprises of successful software releases.

DevOps is now extensively adopted by the IT sector, with notable examples including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and BMC Software. Companies are now looking at ways to expand DevOps ideas across the whole corporation, not just IT.

Cultivating a DevOps culture can be challenging, but the rewards in increased satisfaction for developers, managers, and customers alike are worth it.