What can a DevOps culture do for your business? Traditionally, technology roles were seen as pockets of excellence that enabled an IT company to make the most of its resources. However, this idea is changing given the dynamic business environment and intense competition that prevails in today’s globalized world.
For example, developers like to innovate and come up with new ways to make a system more efficient, while the operations team may be opposed to any change whatsoever as it undermines stability and reliability. Such conflicts eventually have a negative impact on the performance of a software product, and brings about much frustration to everyone involved.
DevOps (development and operations) is an enterprise software development phrase used to mean a type of agile relationship between Development and IT Operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units to establish a DevOps culture.
What is DevOps?
To overcome such conflicts, a new culture or concept called DevOps is evolving. As the name suggests, it is a close collaboration between the development and operation teams to work towards the common goal of improving the quality of every product, and eventually increasing revenue for the organization.
In other words, DevOps is a set of tools and best practices that integrates the processes of development, deployment, and operation to tap into the many advantages that come with such collaboration. It represents a new mindset or DevOps culture where everyone comes together to improve the products and services they offer, through better communication, understanding, and collaboration.
In this sense, a DevOps team is a cross-functional team consisting of developers, QAs, business analysts, operation engineers, business managers, and more who collaborate together to reduce conflicts and improve efficiency.
What can DevOps do for your business?
The goal of every company is to generate profits through products and services that exceed the expectations of their customers. A DevOps culture creates the right culture and mindset to meet this goal. Here are some of the advantages DevOps provides for your business:
Faster deployment
Typically, companies that incorporate DevOps deploy code 30 times faster, and have less than 50 percent failures when compared to companies that don’t implement DevOps, according to a survey by Puppet Labs.
Faster time-to-market
DevOps helps you to go from an idea to working software within a short time, and in turn, this helps you to gain a competitive advantage in the industry.
Continuous software delivery
Companies with a DevOps culture enhance the process of continuous incremental improvements to give you a greater degree of flexibility to try new features.
Stability and innovation
Traditionally, development teams were evaluated on their innovative ability to bring in new features, while the operations team was judged on a product’s stability. Unfortunately, these opposing parameters cause much conflict in performance measurement.
Since a DevOps culture brings these different teams together, your company gets the best of both stability and innovation. At the same time, the performance metrics are more standardized, thereby making it easier to evaluate the performance of different teams.
Less complex problems
DevOps encourages different groups to share a code base, perform continuous integration and automate deployments, among other things. As a result, problems within a software or infrastructure are exposed at a much earlier stage, so they tend to be less complex. Also, resolution time is faster because of improved communication and reduced dependence.
More time for innovation
Automated deployments, a key aspect of DevOps, makes deployments more predictable and easier. At the same time, it takes away much of the routine and repetitive tasks from employees, to give them more time and space for innovation.
A DevOps culture eliminates departmentalization problems
When you have a cross-functional team that communicates and collaborates together, it’s the end of departmentalization problems like a single point of error and work redundancy.
Reduced cost
DevOps reduces costs significantly, as lesser time is spent on fixing errors. Improved communication and shorter development cycles also help to bring down the cost of resources.
More flexibility
DevOps gives your organization the flexibility to tap into the power of emerging technologies like cloud computing, as much of the deployment is automated and the architecture tends to comprise of loosely coupled components.
Conclusion
In short, DevOps represents a cultural shift in the way different IT teams collaborate and work together, as it is a practice where developers understand infrastructure and operations engineers understand code, to learn all the parts as a whole. Such a change in mindset reverberates across the entire organization, and creates a positive environment that greatly increases productivity and efficiency, not to mention the increased revenue.
DevOps is undoubtedly revolutionizing the IT industry by improving performance, reducing costs, encouraging innovation and reducing failures, and through it all, offers immense benefits for every business.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) understands the importance of DevOps for your business, and this is why they offer many tools based on DevOps principles and practices. AWS CloudFormation, AWS Amazon Machine Image (AMI), AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, AWS OpsWorks, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Blue-Green Deployment, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and AWS Identity and Access Management Service (IAM) are some of the offerings from AWS, aimed to help your business make the most of DevOps and establish a DevOps culture within their organizations.
Want to learn more about DevOps?
Download our whitepaper to learn how CI/CD on AWS makes it easier for DevOps teams to build, test, and deploy apps in the cloud.
