Businesses with fundamental IT issues can attribute them to any number of underlying causes, from a lack of collaboration and communication to massive amounts of compounding technical debt.
However, it’s not always easy or possible for organizations to self-diagnose where exactly they’re going wrong, which only serves to exacerbate the problems as they tinker with the wrong things. In many cases, a significant paradigm shift is necessary in order for these organizations to exit their downward spiral and get back on track.
Fortunately, many companies are doing just that by taking a new approach that has many advantages to recommend it: DevOps. Here’s a look at what DevOps has to offer for both the technical and business sides of your organization.
The Technical Benefits of DevOps
- Continuous software delivery: DevOps includes the practice of continuous delivery, in which your code base is made available for testing or production on a regular basis as a central part of its principles. Companies such as Amazon have used continuous delivery to roll out a new feature into production at an incredible average time of 11.6 seconds between deployments. As we’ll discuss below, continuous delivery is a crucial factor in providing the other benefits of DevOps.
- Less complex problems to fix: Because DevOps is all about frequent incremental improvements, developers’ changes tend to be smaller for any given deployment. This means that the problems introduced during a deployment are likewise smaller and therefore easier to troubleshoot or roll back.
- Faster resolution of problems: By encouraging collaboration between the different parts of your business, DevOps leverages the brainpower of the entire organization to resolve issues more quickly. You don’t have to wait for another team to fix the problem; instead, you can jump in and start solving it yourself.
The Business Benefits of DevOps
- Faster delivery of features: Continuous delivery means that features are deployed in production soon after they’ve been developed. Another factor in the improved speed of DevOps is the use of automated processes for tasks such as testing, cloud infrastructure and logging and monitoring.
- More stable operating environments: Since continuous delivery reduces the severity of potential problems, it also tends to result in greater stability. The Puppet survey also found that high-performing DevOps organizations recovered from downtime 96 times faster and also experienced breaking changes five times less often.
Final Thoughts
Before DevOps, organizations often felt that they had to choose between software quality and speed, sacrificing one for the other. In addition, different parts of the business were frequently seen as at odds—if not in outright conflict. Developers were tasked only with providing new features and bug fixes, while the operations team was in charge of the stability and health of the system, which meant that they were often opposed to new changes that might affect reliability and uptime.
The arrival of DevOps has changed all that, enabling cross-functional teams working together for the good of everyone involved. DevOps represents a cultural shift in how the entire organization collaborates, building a more positive and productive workplace environment. To read more about DevOps best practices, read our latest ebook, Succeeding with DevOps.
Originally published by Small Footprint.