13 Jul

What are the Key Benefits of DevOps for Businesses

What is DevOps?

With an ever-increasing demand for high-quality products at a rapid pace, the demand for more effective software development processes has become the need of the hour for businesses. This requirement for faster and quality software need has been sufficed with the evolution of a new software development methodology named DevOps. The term DevOps stands for Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) which is an effective methodology that bridges the gap between development and operations teams and fosters a seamless DevOps culture enabling faster and quality releases ensuring faster time-to-market.

Evidently, DevOps has emerged as an alternative to the waterfall model where earlier the software testing was taken up at the end of the development process leading to more bug detection at the end. But, in DevOps methodology, the development and testing take place hand-in-hand to deliver faster and quality releases. DevOps processes with continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) ensure digital businesses faster and quality releases leveraging test automation with effective toolchains and ensure close collaboration between the developers and the quality assurance teams.

What are the Main Principles of DevOps?

Seamless Collaboration between DevOps and Ops Teams: DevOps processes ensure seamless collaboration and communication between development and operations teams that helps to faster problem-solving and more efficient workflows across the software development lifecycle.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): CI is a unique process in which any changes made to the codebase are quickly merged into a central repository such as SVN, Git, etc. This integration practice helps both Dev and QA teams to detect bugs and issues at a faster pace.

Test Automation: Leveraging test automation using various open-source and commercial tools helps DevOps teams with faster delivery of features with improved efficiency.

Continuous Monitoring and Feedback: DevOps fosters a continuous monitoring feature wherein gathering feedback from both technical and also from stakeholders improves the overall software development process.

Establishing DevOps Culture: The DevOps culture truly helps businesses to increase the speed of deployment and releases by removing obstacles.

What are the Benefits for Businesses Embracing DevOps?

There are numerous benefits to embracing DevOps implementations for digital businesses across industries of healthcare, BFSI, logistics, airlines, eCommerce, etc. DevOps benefits for businesses have been detailed below:

Software output-based benefits:

• Faster and quality releases with Test Automation: The success of DevOps revolves around the automation of the processes for integrating new features in applications and ensuring their continuous deployment.
• Faster delivery with shorter time-to-market of new features: DevOps practices enable faster and quality releases, thus allowing organizations to respond more effectively to market changes and customer demands with better and high-quality products.

 

Team collaboration-based Benefits:

• No silos due to enhanced team collaboration: Traditional waterfall development methodologies confine every department to its processes wherein developers write their code and build components without any interference from operations and security teams, thus leading to silos. But, in DevOps, the Dev and Ops teams collaborate to ensure high-quality releases as it fosters a culture of open communication.
• Faster feedback loops: DevOps ensures faster feedback from both the QA teams and also from the stakeholders. The bugs once identified are quickly attended by the Dev teams to ensure improved processes and quicker iteration for the release of quality products.
• Improves code quality with DevOps CI/CD: DevOps methodology eliminates tedious and time taking manual hosting and configuration management while both the configuration and operations are managed in a better way through the code.
• Reduces manual intervention: DevOps automation reduces manual interventions and ensures faster releases as test scripts are used to run the defined tests. Thus, the QA resources can be used for other better decision-making activities.
• Delivers comprehensive metrics about application performance: DevOps implementations ensure seamless software performance and deliver comprehensive metrics of the application performance with test automation in place.

Customer-based Benefits:

• Quality releases improve customer satisfaction: The DevOps model relies on feedback, not only from internal teams but also from customers, clients, and stakeholders. This open feedback loop makes it possible for organizations to deliver improved customer satisfaction with high-quality products at a faster pace.

 

Cost-based Benefits

• Ensures effective cost savings: By automating processes leveraging open-source and commercial test automation tools, reduces the time and resources required to deliver software and thus ensures significant cost savings and improves the business bottom line.

What are the 5 Best Practices for an Effective DevOps Adoption?

1. Define a reachable set of objectives and goals: It is important to clearly define the achievable goals and objectives with proper metrics to ensure the success of DevOps implementations.
2. Initiate with a small start and increase slowly: Businesses should start small with manageable projects and test the progress and then refine the DevOps processes before scaling it up for larger projects.
3. Involve all stakeholders: It is necessary to involve and make all the stakeholders participate in the DevOps processes implementation including business analysts, development, and operations teams, stakeholders, and others to make the DevOps process a success.
4. Adopt effective communication across teams: DevOps ensures seamless communication which should be upheld to get effective implementations with seamless communication, feedback, and collaboration across teams.
5. Review processes, with innovation and culture shift: It is essential to regularly review DevOps practices and tools, and make necessary improvements to effectively optimize performance and productivity.

Conclusion:

Today’s digital businesses need faster and quality releases to go to market early and stand ahead of the competition. DevOps is the go-to software methodology for digital businesses that ensures seamless collaboration between teams to enable faster and quality releases with quicker time to market. It helps businesses to adopt a DevOps culture wherein processes are improved with continuous learning and leveraging the right tools and technologies. Therefore, businesses need to adopt the DevOps best practices and adopt the values of a culture shift, leverage test automation, and implement CI/CD pipelines to enable quality and faster releases and reap numerous benefits.