Unlocking the Business Value of DevOps

Today’s businesses want to compete with each other with increasing efficiency and speed in delivering software to customers. At the same time, there is growing pressure for sustainable development, which requires reviewing many business processes. It is not easy to achieve when not all employees feel that their work impacts the functioning of the entire company.

The undeniable value of DevOps is rebuilding unity between the development and operational teams and cultivating the attitude that every action affects the company and customer satisfaction. Employees who begin to feel a meaningful purpose for their work care more about getting the best results.

What actually is DevOps culture? Is it just better communication between the two departments? Get to know more in the following paragraphs.

The term “DevOps” originates from a combination of two prefixes. “Dev” refers to developers, QA, testers, and others responsible for software delivery. On the other hand, “Ops” refers to the network, system, release engineers, and other operational staff like security or admins. The partnership between the two departments is expected to result in improved dialogue, better information flow, reduced software development time, and the establishment of smooth processes.

DevOps lifecycle is a continuous software development process in which the activities of developers and operations intertwine. This process allows for seamless collaboration that results in efficient code in less time. The DevOps lifecycle consists of several elements, usually represented as an infinite loop or circle. These are:
• continuous development,
• continuous integration,
• continuous testing,
• continuous deployment,
• continuous feedback,
• continuous monitoring.

Some best practices reveal the business value of DevOps. As mentioned earlier, every process must be ongoing, from continuous improvement to continuous delivery. In maintaining the continuity of all tasks, the customer’s needs must be always in mind. They are the center of the entire process, and being guided by them from the beginning will save costly and time-consuming revisions in the future.

How does the team keep on the client-centric path? This is supported by many DevOps tools that help automate specific tasks and processes. Most often, teams use:
• Jira – to define a project scope and plan the tasks,
• Kubernetes/Docker – to build individual development environments,
• GitHub – to source control and collaboration,
• AWS/Bitbucket Pipelines – to continuous delivery,
• Zephyr/Snyk/Mabl – to automated testing.

After an initial introduction to the DevOps environment, it’s time to break down multiple DevOps values. Stay with us and see how working in a continuous software development lifecycle simplifies achieving business goals faster, better, and cheaper.

The DevOps approach improves operational efficiency in many ways. It is undoubtedly influenced by process automation, faster and more reliable application deployment, seamless collaboration between teams, and continuous process monitoring and optimization. All elements contribute to more efficient IT resource management and faster response to changing business requirements.

The agile approach is fast, but the same concept enhanced with a culture of continuous improvement is even faster. Endless development, integration, and testing cycles make time-to-market timelines far shorter. This is the undoubted business value of DevOps for those customers who don’t want to be left behind by the competition.

CI/CD is a revolution over the traditional approach, as it enables ongoing code additions with new features and fixes, and continuous testing quickly detects any bugs or irregularities. This method reduces the likelihood of receiving a product that is already outdated and filled with annoying bugs.

You already know how DevOps’s business values help improve operations and development. Now, it’s time to learn about the intangible business benefits of DevOps that skyrocket the organization’s culture.

The first DevOps value that develops organization members is nurturing a culture of collaboration. Development teams learn to cooperate with operational workers, which results in an effective exchange of experiences, and all team leaders are responsible for the consistency of activities.

Work on a project cannot happen in a void. Another business DevOps value promotes better cooperation, which helps team members understand each other and see how individual actions affect the work of colleagues and the result.

A team that brings the most DevOps value to your organization is one in which everyone has an assigned role. It’s important to distribute them according to technical skills and soft competencies. A well-managed and communicated team adopts DevOps principles more easily.

It may seem that communicating with several teams in one building is easier. However, implementing DevOps practices can be tricky, as in any process.

When introducing a DevOps approach, you may find that many people are resistant to change. Developers will not be eager to break the silos until they understand what DevOps values mean to them.

Management must gradually introduce the next steps of DevOps so that employees can naturally implement them in their daily work. It’s also invaluable to constantly show how work results positively change with the new concept.

DevOps is a mental change and an upgrade of legacy infrastructure. To develop software faster, a move to a microservices architecture is necessary. Compared to legacy solutions, microservices are a more complex system for which automation and CI/CD need to be configured in advance. This will make the transition to microservices less complicated and allow the company to bring the business value of DevOps to customers faster.

Technology also helps make the transition to DevOps easier. As mentioned above, there are plenty of tools to manage continuous development. In addition, daily work can be supported by the right metrics tools that indicate the parameters of DevOps success.

What future will bring? Is the development of artificial intelligence going to change the development of modern contact norms? Let’s consider this in the following paragraphs.

The development of AI is already affecting the DevOps approach in significant ways. First and foremost, it improves its security by finding anomalies in real time and reduces vulnerability to cyber attacks. AI also extends the ability to automate repetitive tasks and facilitates flexible infrastructure scalability.

Other DevOps core elements that will play an even more significant role will be serverless computing, containers and orchestrations, edge computing, and infrastructure as a code (IaC). The last will help manage infrastructure faster and more efficiently, allowing it to deploy in version-controlled mode.

What can we expect in DevOps in the next ten years? Probably, it will be no big deal for the next generation of IT workers and start-ups. The DevOps approach will be chosen naturally, and microservices implementation will not be perceived as a trouble but a necessity.

Looking at the rapid development of tools, especially those based on AI, perhaps in the next decade of DevOps, the current popular solutions will be displaced by faster and more intuitive software products. This will undoubtedly reflect speed, efficiency, and performance improvements as well.

Do you want to benefit from an experienced DevOps team that will help you get a new application faster than competitors using a standard approach? Or maybe you want to know the secrets of DevOps specialists who will help you unlock the business value of DeOps? Check out how we at Scalo collaborate with our clients and schedule an initial call!