A successfully implemented Development and Operations methodology will help you to release things faster and maintain high quality at the same time.
43% of companies that are implementing Development and Operations strategy want to strengthen their time to market. DevOps helps them arrive at the right time in a new market or launch an innovative product before competitors will take market shares. It is more and more popular approach in software development and in our article you can check why.
What is DevOps methodology?
DevOps (an acronym for Development and Operations) is the work culture of software engineers. At the same time, it is a set of practices aimed at continuous integration of the development process and the process of implementation, maintenance, and service of the product into one process focusing on the continuous delivery of value in the product directly to the customer. The most important part of this approach is the organization’s focus on shortening the time from the idea for new functionality to its installation at the customer’s site with expected quality.
The key DevOps practices include configuration management, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), automated testing, infrastructure as code approach (with tools like AWS CloudFormation or Azure Resource Manager), continuous deployment, and continuous monitoring.
The role of DevOps
DevOps’s role is to stimulate collaboration and innovation throughout the software development process. How? By educating and support employees in all IT areas that standard procedures enable achieving the intended goals easier, faster, safer, and using resources more effectively.
DevOps also introduces an iterative work model, consistent with Agile assumptions. In practice, this means multiple iterations and releasing the product (wking code) as early as possible. An essential element is also the automation of processes. Which ones? For example – building a work environment that performs functions that previously required time-consuming or manual work (e.g., automation of implementations).
Customer-centric actions, end-to-end responsibility, continuous integration and improvement, and automation are just a few DevOps principles.
DevOps Tools
There are a few key practices that help organizations through automating and streamlining the software development and infrastructure management processes and most of them demand proper tooling. There is a huge variety of DevOps tools, but amongst the most popular we can list the following:
- Version Control tools (GitHub, GitLab),
- Container Management tools (docker, Kubernetes),
- Application Performance Monitoring tools (AppDynamics),
- Deployment & Server Monitoring tools (DataDog),
- CI / Deployment Automation tools (Jenkins),
- or Test Automation tools (Test.ai, Selenium).
The worldwide revenue of the DevOps software tools market totaled USD 8.5 billion in 2019.
Independent teams of developers
DevOps adoption extends the scope of independent development teams’ activities working in an agile manner to administer the system they create. For this purpose, it uses the Continuous Deployment paradigm.
The mentioned paradigm says that the team builds and tests software in an environment identical to the production environment. This means that any change introduced and tested by the development team can potentially be installed at the customer’s site. This requires the use of tools that can continuously and quickly build a product from the modified code, introduce it to the system, automatically install it on target devices, perform functional tests of the finished solution.
In the end, they should have the potential to be installed at the customers’ premises. If development teams find a bug in any of these steps, they roll back the change. Then the additional development work is done on improvements.
DevOps may seem like a technical issue. However, it is a business problem that contributes to creating a competitive advantage for the enterprise. Organizations using a DevOps model have teams that view the entire development and infrastructure lifecycle.
The DevOps team gains the ability to deliver value that exactly matches the customer’s expectations. They keep it in the feedback loop during product development. They have the possibility to bring the technology to the market earlier than the competition thanks to the reduction of time from idea to production).
Why should you consider DevOps strategy for software development processes?
First of all – saving money. Development and Operations methodology will help you cut the release cost for one application up to 97% by automating some parts of the process. Secondly – saving time. The time of releasing one application can be reduced by 89%, which brings another benefit – the staff required to do it is decreased even up to three-quarters. According to research, high-performing DevOps organizations are twice as likely (compared to other companies) to exceed profitability, market share, and other financial goals.
The DevOps leads to faster deployments (30 times more deployments made for 60 times fewer incidents) and faster delivery (440 times less time to deliver). According to the State of DevOps Report 2019, companies experienced 106 times faster lead time from committing to deploy stage, 2604 times more rapid recovery from failures and unexpected incidents, and seven times lower failure change failure rate.
DevOps culture can improve your organizational works. It helps you in a better estimation of operational costs (up to 6 times) and minimize time on unplanned work and rework by 22%. This is not only a way for time and money savings in your company. It also brings real value to your customers. DevOps allow you to achieve two times more employee satisfaction and an 18 percent improvement in customer satisfaction.
The biggest problems of IT industry
According to a study conducted by IDC and AppDynamics, companies can lose $8,580 to $686,250 per hour due to infrastructure dysfunction. On average, companies facing downtimes lose $163,674 per year. You need to take into account the time as well. 35% of responders claim to spend 1 to 12h to repair production incidents.
Hourly application downtime costs can range from $1.25 to $2.5 billion for a Fortune 1000 firm, and that the average cost of a critical application failure is $500,000 to $1 million per hour. That’s why high-performing organizations are able to save an average of over $91 million per year.
Benefits od DevOps practices implementation
Half of the companies claim that they reduced spend, time-to-market, and rise of revenue with DevOps implementation. Thanks to this, they can respond better to market needs. This strategy, although more and more popular, is still present in just a few businesses. However, due to the enormous benefits, it will be a necessity in every organization from the IT sector in the future.
Successful DevOps implementation will support faster deployment, a stable work environment, increased security, and automation of repetitive tasks. It helps you to use your resources more effectively. Incorporating the best practices for software development allows developers to automate processes and release code faster.
Automated processes, collaboration, and transparency are the biggest advantages of introducing DevOps practices and tools. It can support your company in services quality assurance and software delivery. DevOps culture is a great way for business development and not only your company, but your customers and your software’s end users can benefit from it.
If you are interested in how DevOps works in our company and what our team members think about DevOps, follow our blog for the next parts of this series.
