Apps are making the world a simpler, faster place. Mortgages can be verified in minutes. Food shows up at doorsteps with a few clicks. A safe ride is just a pin-drop away. For consumers, having a smooth, flawless and enjoyable app experience is the status quo. However, what goes on behind the scenes to make it happen is infinitely more complex.
From developers to architects and QA to test automation engineers, the software we interact with requires connected teams to ensure that security, reliability, speed and quality are consistently being delivered. For years, technical teams operated in silos that were worlds apart. Application and software delivery processes were slow, painful and error-prone—a dangerous mix for failure.
About a decade ago, DevOps was introduced as a remedy.
While definitions of DevOps can vary, it is essentially about aligning people, tools and processes to make software delivery better, faster, cheaper and more enjoyable for those involved (which tends to lead to happy customers, too). However, with the boom in DevOps technologies and resources, cutting through the noise and honing in on what will make the biggest impact can be something of a struggle.
In this series, we will address why DevOps is a key enabler for success, the trends impacting the software delivery industry, DevOps challenges, tips and more. First, let’s dig into why DevOps should be a part of an overall business strategy.
Times are changing, and so are IT best practices. So, what makes DevOps great for business success?
As mentioned, customers expect new product features to be delivered continuously—with quality and security guaranteed. In order to deliver on this promise, the entire IT organization must work in unison toward the same goals, and these goals should be centered around better customer experience. Much of a DevOps transformation is focused on culture, and when everyone from developers and business leads to legal and marketing teams are collaborating and happy, it leads to positive business outcomes. In fact, according to the findings in the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, organizations that invest in creating a culture of psychological safety and collaboration are more likely to be high performing.
Being a high performing organization sounds like a no-brainer, but what does it really mean? According to the same report, the highest performing organizations have 208 times more frequent code deployments, recover 2,604 times faster from incidents and deploy 106 times faster than low performing organizations. DevOps is the foundation that makes this high performance possible. This means that organizations that aren’t adopting DevOps will be left in the dust.
DevOps is a set of practices that combine software development and information technology operations to shorten the systems development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives. The practices help deliver features to end-users much faster and with higher quality, testing and documentation. Processes should be reproducible and auditable, making the technical infrastructure more secure and reliable as a result. Ultimately, DevOps leads to happy and productive teams, satisfied customers and keeps the budget in the black.
There’s much more to uncover when it comes to DevOps—in the next part of this series we will look at some of the common mistakes made along the DevOps transformation journey.
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