If you are asking yourself why DevOps, then read here the benefits it brings to both the team and the customers.
Nowadays, people make their lives easier by using innovative applications for shopping, entertainment, banking, and health, among others.
Companies interact with their customers through software delivered as online services or applications and on all sorts of devices. They also use software to increase operational efficiencies such as logistics and communications, turning applications into an integral component for every business.
This reality has led to a clear problem: an increase in customer necessities reflected in higher requirements for applications and the need for the software industry to adapt to new technologies to mature faster and to make product delivery cycles become shorter. Additionally, the high demand of software encouraged teams to start developing in parallel in multiple locations, something that impacted the complexity of the development process.
Clearly, all those aspects started to make the product supply related tasks more challenging every day, something that provoked the industry to reevaluate the need for an enhanced delivery process.
DevOps originated as a new software engineering culture and practice that combines software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops) teams to work together for the same goal: to create an organized and safe delivery process that coordinates development, testing, and deployment of products.
The culture of DevOps is based on communication and collaboration throughout the software supply chain to ensure the best possible outcome. DevOps culture believes in the concept of automation to optimize productivity and minimize human errors.
So why Devops? It’s simple: It provides solutions to two main perspectives in the following way:
1. From the team perspective
The build and deployment-related tasks were always painful in a non-DevOps environment since missing incidents started appearing here.
These are the stages where specific environment-related issues surge and where all the development that has been implemented by many team members become merged to produce the final version that is going to be delivered.
These kinds of issues are common in a non-DevOps environment since the DEV and IT teams work separately, with everyone just taking care of his/her own individual responsibilities. With this sort of team organization, people can spend hours and even days trying to reproduce and resolve every emerging problem, something that could end up with frustrated team members, system instability, and delays on deliveries.
The DevOps culture overcomes these issues by assigning the delivery responsibilities to the entire team and by promoting collaboration and automation throughout the delivery process to minimize pre and post-deployment headaches.
DevOps relies on two main automated processes known as continuous integration and continuous delivery, both implemented to get faster development cycles without compromising the product’s quality. Due to their trusted automated process, DevOps also cares about deployment in diverse environments. In this way, the development team gains more time to concentrate its efforts on new customer necessities rather than on researching deployment-related issues. Additionally, due to the shorter development cycles, problem solving tends to be simpler and detected in earlier stages.
2. From the customers perspective
Customers’ business can experience negative impacts due to production issues not detected during the development process. The resulting implications can be a system malfunction, wrong accounting calculations, or even system inaccessibility.
All those aspects could result in negative side effects like user dissatisfaction and a decrease in company revenues that could lead to the loss of millions of dollars.
Innovation is also a key factor that impacts customers’ business effectiveness. The more quickly new features and bugs fixes are released, the faster the adaptation is to changing markets. Delays in this aspect can result in the loss of an opportunity window for a business.
DevOps improves the customer’s business value by providing a continuous delivery of products that satisfy their needs. It also promotes faster delivery of features due to the automation process implemented all over the supply chain.
Furthermore, system recovery time is minimized due to the shorter delivery cycles and the improved communication and collaboration between developers and operation team members, which is combined with the automated delivery process that verifies that each change is functional and safe to release.
As a consequence, time and money can be destined to system innovation rather than to fixing bugs or maintenance related tasks, which allows businesses to grow and compete more efficiently in the market.
To Sum Up
Software has become a main necessity for people to add convenience to their lives and for companies to support their business. This has led to a high diversity of software demand that is growing day by day.
Deliveries have evolved from big occasional updates to small frequent incremental ones, a change that forced the popular traditional release practices to become obsolete. DevOps is a software engineering culture originated to fit an Agile delivery process that can afford high software demand. Why DevOps? Because this model relies on effective automated processes to help teams to efficiently and safely deploy and innovate for their customers.
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