Why DevOps is Important for Modern Businesses
We are certainly in a faster-paced world. Organizations must get out of their silos and follow a more collaborative and efficient process to achieve excellence as we progress. Organizations that adopt DevOps can evolve and improve software products much faster when compared to those that use traditional software development processes. So Why DevOps is important for businesses in 2023.
DevOps is a bridge between development and operations in an organization and aims to improve productivity as a whole. It brings release and deployment activities closer to development and testing. DevOps also makes testing an enabler for high-quality releases rather than a bottleneck.
Table Of Contents
Benefits of DevOps for Businesses
Faster and More Reliable Software Releases:
DevOps practises help businesses achieve quicker and more reliable software releases by automating the software release process with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This results in faster development cycles, faster time-to-market, and more efficient delivery of new features and upgrades to consumers. DevOps’ automation and standardised processes also help to increase dependability by reducing the likelihood of human mistake during deployment.
Improved Collaboration and Communication:
DevOps fosters a culture of cooperation and communication across various software development teams, resulting in faster and more efficient software delivery and improved communication, leading to increased productivity and customer satisfaction. It breaks down silos and promotes cross-functional cooperation, leading to quicker and more efficient software delivery.
Enhanced Scalability and Flexibility:
DevOps helps businesses manage workloads and user expectations by automating resource provisioning and deployment. It also helps enterprises adopt cloud computing, resulting in faster resource provisioning and increased application performance. IaC and containerization are used to automate resource provisioning and deployment, making it easier to scale up or down.
Continuous Feedback and Improvement:
Continuous feedback loops and iterative improvement are key to DevOps, allowing businesses to quickly discover bottlenecks, performance difficulties, and other problems. This feedback loop enables faster issue resolution, continual optimisation, and rapid response to changing client demands. Businesses can also discover and resolve issues early in the development cycle using continuous integration and testing, increasing overall software quality and lowering the likelihood of production failures.
Challenges of DevOps
While DevOps provides various benefits, organizations may face problems during its adoption. Among the most prevalent difficulties are:
- Cultural Transformation: DevOps implementation requires a culture transformation, which requires breaking down silos and encouraging communication across development, operations, and other teams. Organizations must engage in training, education, and change management activities to navigate this cultural revolution effectively.
- Toolchain Complexity: DevOps uses various tools and technologies to automate and streamline various processes. The complex toolchain can present challenges regarding integration, compatibility, and managing multiple tools simultaneously. Organizations must carefully evaluate and select the right tools, ensure they work well together, and provide adequate training and support for their teams to utilize them effectively.
- Security and Compliance: DevOps practices, such as rapid software releases and automation, can potentially introduce security risks if not properly addressed. Ensuring the security of applications and infrastructure throughout the development and deployment lifecycle becomes crucial. Organizations must incorporate security measures into their DevOps processes, implement secure coding practices, conduct regular vulnerability assessments, and comply with industry regulations to mitigate risks and maintain data privacy.
- Legacy Systems and Infrastructure: Many organizations have legacy systems and infrastructure that may not easily align with DevOps principles and practices. Integrating legacy systems with modern DevOps pipelines can be challenging, especially if these systems lack automation capabilities or require manual intervention. Organizations may need to invest in refactoring, modernizing, or replacing legacy systems to fully leverage DevOps’s benefits.
- Skills and Expertise Gap: DevOps requires a diverse set of skills, including coding, automation, cloud computing, infrastructure management, and collaboration. Organizations may face challenges in finding and retaining skilled professionals with expertise in these areas. Upskilling existing employees, partnering with external experts, and investing in training programs can help bridge the skills gap and ensure teams are equipped to implement and maintain DevOps practices effectively.
- Continuous Monitoring and Feedback: Establishing effective monitoring and feedback mechanisms in a DevOps environment can be challenging. Organizations must implement robust monitoring and logging systems to gain insights into application performance, infrastructure health, and user behavior. This requires investing in the right monitoring tools, defining appropriate metrics, and establishing a culture of continuous monitoring and feedback to detect and address issues promptly.
The Future of DevOps
The future of DevOps holds exciting possibilities as organizations continue to embrace digital transformation and seek ways to accelerate software delivery and improve collaboration. Here are some key areas that will shape the future of DevOps:
AI and Machine Learning in DevOps:
AI and ML can automate operations, optimize resource allocation, detect trends, and forecast and avoid incidents. Intelligent algorithms can analyze large amounts of data and deliver actionable insights, allowing businesses to increase productivity, spot abnormalities, and continuously improve their DevOps processes..
DevSecOps and Security Automation:
Integrating security into DevOps processes will become even more critical as security threats evolve. DevSecOps, incorporating security principles and processes throughout the DevOps lifecycle, will gain prominence. Automation will play a key role in security, with organizations leveraging tools and technologies to automate security testing, vulnerability scanning, compliance checks, and incident response. DevSecOps will ensure that security is built into applications from the start, enabling organizations to respond swiftly to emerging threats.
Serverless and Cloud-native Technologies:
DevOps will be significantly impacted by serverless computing and cloud-native architectures. Serverless systems isolate infrastructure administration from developers, allowing them to focus on coding while minimizing operations activities. Containers and microservices are cloud-native technologies that improve scalability, portability, and resilience. DevOps teams will use these technologies to design and deploy systems that can quickly scale, easily maintain, and take advantage of cloud-based benefits.
GitOps and Infrastructure as Code:
GitOps uses Git repositories as a single source of truth for declarative infrastructure and application designs. It helps organizations manage infrastructure and application changes by combining version control and pull-based processes with automated deployments driven by code changes. IaC will remain a key practise, allowing organisations to describe and manage infrastructure using code, boosting consistency, repeatability, and automation.
NoOps and Autonomous Operations:
NoOps, in which operations duties are abstracted and automated, is expected to advance. Intelligent automation and self-healing capabilities will eliminate the need for human procedures while increasing system reliability. Machine learning algorithms and AI-driven systems will monitor, optimize, and manage infrastructure and applications, freeing human resources for more strategic and value-added activities.The future of DevOps will be driven by automation, collaboration, continuous delivery, security, scalability, and resilience.
Why DevOps Really Matters For Modern Businesses?
Successfully implementing DevOps practices in your organization can have a significant impact through improved efficiency, greater security, and organizational collaboration. According to the 2017 State of DevOps Report, those organizations that have employed DevOps practices spend 21 percent less time on unplanned work and rework, and 44 percent more time on new work which leads to higher efficiency.
For example, when Microsoft decided to implement DevOps culture and use DevOps practices in its Cloud + Enterprise engineering group, the software giant was able to scale and deliver high-quality services to its customers all across the world far more quickly than it had delivered previously.
8 Reasons Why DevOps is Important for Modern Businesses
Here are a few reasons why DevOps is important for modern businesses:
1. Shorter Development Cycles
Companies succeed due to their ability to innovate faster than their competitors. The main objectives of DevOps are automation, continuous delivery and quick feedback cycle. Due to quick and continuous feedback, the majority of the errors are fixed in time which helps in achieving faster releases. A combination of development and operations efforts in DevOps lead to quick development and release of applications in the market.
2. Early Detection of Errors
The collaborative nature of the DevOps model facilitates a culture of knowledge sharing across the teams. The continuous monitoring and testing of the code improve the overall build quality of the application. As teams are empowered to share their feedback with others, defects are detected and resolved early in the development process.
3. Continuous Release and Deployment
Software development practices these days require teams to deliver quality software continuously and reduce go-to-market timelines. This can be achieved with DevOps using automation. The Development and Operations teams can develop and integrate code instantly with the help of automated CI and CD pipeline. Overall, DevOps facilitates continuous release and deployment with better quality and efficiency.
4. Better Communication Between Teams
DevOps improves business agility by providing an atmosphere of mutual collaboration, effective communication, and integration across all the global teams in an IT organization. The pre-set boundaries based on roles are getting diminished in such an encouraging DevOps environment. The DevOps culture focuses on performance rather than individual goals. This makes the processes more transparent as individuals work towards a common goal.
5. Reduced Implementation Failure
One of the most common reasons for implementation failure is due to programming defects. As DevOps promotes frequent code versions, it is easy to detect code defects. Also, recovery is much faster when both the development teams and operation teams work together taking into account the challenges of both the teams during development.
6. Reduced General Costs
All the benefits of DevOps listed above result in reduced general costs and requirement of IT staff. According to Kevin Murphy from Red Hat, DevOps development teams reduce the requirement of IT staff by 35 percent and overall IT costs by 30 percent.
7. Innovative Mindset
The deployment phase becomes more relaxed in teams that follow DevOps. The teams are better rested as DevOps streamlining processes promotes efficient releases and quality builds. As a result of this, there is huge scope to bring an innovative approach in resolving key issues.
8. Greater Customer Satisfaction
According to Puppet’s 2016 State of DevOps Report, organizations can improve their deployment frequency by two hundred times with DevOps and reduce change failure rates by three times. The reliability and stability of an application can be ensured with the automation of the delivery pipeline. With the flawless performance by the applications in production, organizations can achieve greater customer satisfaction.
Despite having numerous benefits for an organization, DevOps is often taken as a relatively new technical concept which has been misunderstood or misused since its inception.
This lack of clarity and confusion in implementing DevOps principles has negatively impacted small and medium organizations. As a result, there is strategic confusion among the teams which is affecting the speed and efficiency that DevOps is supposed to promote.
One of the things that are always overlooked in DevOps practices is continuous testing or automated testing. Without complete automation of testing, the pipelines are never fully automated and therefore the objectives of DevOps are not fulfilled.
According to the World Quality report, there are still 70% of the companies yet to automate their testing for many reasons. Organizations need to understand that compromising on the quality of an application in favour of faster releases will only lead to reduced customer satisfaction.
Integrating automated testing with DevOps is the best thing to do if your objective is to not only save time and money but also to keep the quality intact while reducing the time-to-market.
Though there are several open-source tools and testing frameworks available in the market for continuous testing in DevOps, the right choice of tools will make a huge difference as it not only increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications at a faster rate but also helps in their configuration, integration and delivery management needs.
Testsigma is one such cloud-based automation testing tool which paves way for continuous testing in Agile and DevOps. As an early adopter of DevOps and Agile methodologies, It can be easily integrated to function as a part of your DevTestOps cycles. With parallel test executions, Testsigma can help reduce your regression time significantly which leads to faster feedback in Agile and DevOps.
If the goal for implementation of DevOps in your organization is ‘reduced time-to-market’ with ‘improved quality’ – Testsigma is the tool you are looking for.
Add continuous testing to your pipelines. Deliver quality products faster.
Conclusion
DevOps provides enterprises with advantages such as quicker and more reliable software releases, cooperation and communication, increased scalability and flexibility, and constant feedback and improvement. However, it requires overcoming obstacles such as cultural shift, toolchain complexity, security and compliance issues, legacy systems, a skills and expertise mismatch, and establishing appropriate monitoring and feedback mechanisms. Despite these hurdles, DevOps can significantly improve software development and operational efficiency, accelerate innovation, and generate superior business outcomes in the digital market.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main goal of DevOps?
DevOps aims to promote cooperation and integration between development and operations teams to expedite software delivery processes. It seeks to break down silos, automate manual operations, and foster a culture of continuous improvement, allowing organisations to develop high-quality software more quickly.
Do you really need DevOps?
DevOps is a technology-driven approach that encourages effective cooperation, shorter time-to-market, higher software quality, and the ability to adapt quickly to customer input and market needs. It can help organizations remain competitive, drive innovation, and provide greater value to their consumers.
When not to use DevOps?
DevOps may not be appropriate in some situations, such as when the software development process is straightforward and does not involve frequent updates or many teams. Organizations with low resources or in highly regulated industries may have difficulty implementing DevOps practices. However, examining the organization’s goals and limits is important before selecting whether to use DevOps.
Suggested Readings
The DevOps Playbook for modern Agile teams
10 Best DevOps Platforms in 2023
DevOps Configuration Management
DevOps vs CI/CD – The Key Differences
Top 10 DevOps Orchestration Tools
6 Reasons Why to Invest in DevOps Orchestration
Where Do QA and Test Automation Fit in DevOps?
