The notion of DevOps has become more mainstream, and it’s become so for what appears to be an excellent reason. The convergence of DevOps with Agile methodology has become a central practice for delivering software faster and more efficiently. The benefits of DevOps are overweighing its shortcomings, so companies are racing to get up on the DevOps bandwagon.
Though this isn’t an easy fix to all your efficiency problems, adopting agile methodology in software development with complementary DevOps practices will go a long way towards increasing operational productivity, quality, and revenue. Indeed, there’s no denying that DevOps is here to stay, so let’s take a look at the benefits of DevOps implementation.
What exactly is DevOps, and why is it so important?
The term “DevOps” refers to combining software development and operations into a single process. It is often examined from both a technical and a philosophical standpoint.
DevOps improves software development quality and speed and reduces faults by automating essential operational capabilities, such as testing and deployment. It is a method of thinking that focuses on bringing together previously segregated engineering, operations, and testing teams primarily through continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.
One of the DevOps benefits that might rescue your project in specific scenarios is the automation of the software-building processes, such as development, testing, implementation, support, and monitoring. Another key advantage of this strategy is the creation of a bridge between support professionals who analyze the system for errors and specialized engineers who can resolve such issues.
DevOps: How Can It Benefit Your Business?
DevOps practices offer several significant benefits for enterprises. Depending on the priorities of each team, this response may be different. However, there is little doubt that incorporating DevOps ideas into existing working habits will significantly benefit teams, their operations, and the software deployed to customers.
Take a closer look at the benefits and drawbacks of DevOps to learn more about how the principles work in real situations.
#1 Increase Product Build Quality
DevOps unites development and operations. Incorporating the principles of DevOps allows teams to share information and expertise, resulting in more excellent build quality. DevOps requires various units to conduct periodic specialized code reviews to improve code maintainability.
It is in addition to the fact that it blends dev-centric metrics like reusability, performance, and functionality with ops-centric features such as deployment and maintenance, resulting in better code build quality. When it comes to deployment frequency and lead time and the meantime to recovery (MTTR), DevOps has shown to help with code quality and make testing considerably simpler for your IT team.
DevOps contributes to the change in mindset toward continuous delivery improvement, making it a critical contributor to code quality and reliability.
#2 Continuous Deployment for your Code
The focus shifts from integration, delivery, and deployment to continuous integration and deployment with DevOps. What does it imply?
Every line of code your developers contribute to a project will be continuously developed and tested to ensure that the code is always ready for delivery to the end user. The actual deployment happens in the background, with no disruption to the application’s operation, only when required.
While on the other side, if the build fails to finish successfully, all involved developers will be alerted instantly through email, a messaging app, or another method and will be able to resolve the issue promptly.
#3 Corporate Culture of Innovation
DevOps engineers handle virtualized infrastructures where servers are treated like cattle rather than as pets. In contrast to time-consuming manual setups, they may be maintained, operated, and turned off in seconds at absolutely no expense. If an idea fails, it is not because of any flaw in the system. Instead, it is a sign that there is room for improvement in the system.
At the end of the day, DevOps engineers don’t think of it as “Who proposed this ridiculous idea, and how do we get out of it?”. Instead, they ask, “What have we learned from this experience, and how can we improve the system to prevent future breakdowns?” DevOps culture encourages exploration and innovation while avoiding pointing fingers at anybody.
#4 DevSecOps: Security Testing and Securing Continuous Delivery
Expanding DevOps’ fundamental development and operations components, DevSecOps brings a new security component into the pipeline.
The foundation of DevSecOps is that security is the responsibility of everyone, not just security professionals. DevSecOps helps save expenses; it allows you to monitor and discover security risks throughout the development process rather than spending a lot on security after the product is launched.
Some of the DevSecOps advantages include:
- Recognizing bugs and security issues at the early stage of the development cycle,
- Improving security management
- Lowering risk and legal liability
DevSecOps adheres to continuous iterative improvements, simplifying the whole security management process. It also enhances the recovery process in a security breach. Other benefits of using DevSecOps include reduced vulnerabilities and insecure defaults, improved code coverage, and rejuvenating secure design principles.
#5 Customers Perceive the Advantages
Stakeholders inside and outside of the organization may all benefit from DevOps somehow. When it comes to processes like continuous integration and continuous testing, the end-user is the one who benefits the most.
When DevOps methods are effectively adopted inside teams, the outcomes are visible to consumers. It enables teams to adopt a customer-centric approach and prioritize their requirements. The principles help teams and their products to be more concrete by bringing them together with operational teams. Adopting DevOps principles allows them to understand client expectations better and the changes needed to optimize the product.
Conclusion
While DevOps can make life simpler and more secure, particularly when it comes to large, continuously growing projects, the long-term business benefits of a DevOps team can only be realized and quantified over time. There is no set of rules to follow or a particular way to work in DevOps. It is a culture and method that emphasizes continuous development, teamwork, and transparency to achieve success and value proposition – success in developing reliable applications, adopting agile methodologies, increasing revenue, and improving operational efficiency across the board.
Mariusz Michalowski
Community Manager at Spacelift
Mariusz is a Community Manager at Spacelift, a flexible management platform for infrastructure-as-code. He is passionate about automation, DevOps, and open-source solutions. In his free time, he enjoys car detailing, swimming, and nonfiction books.
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