DevOps is a practice that combines software development and IT operations to improve the speed, quality, and efficiency of software delivery. By breaking down traditional silos between development and operations teams and promoting a culture of continuous improvement, DevOps helps organizations achieve their goals and remain competitive in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. To better understand how we asked engineers what key DevOps benefits they noticed since working with this approach.
Primary DevOps Benefits
The following are the core benefits DevOps brings to the way a company works.
1. Improved Time-to-Resolution & Reduced Complexity
DevOps best practices aim to improve the speed and quality of software delivery by automating manual processes and streamlining workflows. This reduces the time to solve problems more quickly, leading to an improved time-to-resolution, as issues can be identified and fixed more efficiently.
Additionally, DevOps emphasizes collaboration and communication between development and operations teams, improving cross-functional collaboration. DevOps also promotes continuous monitoring and feedback, enabling organizations to proactively explore untapped opportunities and resolve problems.
According to Dražen Kovačević, System Integration Manager at Laserline Croatia, “The DevOps team is the bridge that bridges the Dev world from the system engineering world, taking care that their synergy is stronger and thus the product is more stable and better, which certainly affects the business aspect as well.”
2. Greater Scalability and Reliability
By introducing consistency and repeatability into workflows, DevOps allows organizations to deliver software faster and more frequently, which is essential for achieving fast outcomes, which leads to scalability.
Dražen Kovačević also added that “for both areas to develop agilely, ‘someone’ must think about scalability, security, and all other parameters that aren’t under the direct responsibility of the developer team or the system engineering team. This ‘technological-human interface’ was designed specifically for a DevOps team.”
By continuously monitoring the software delivery pipeline, DevOps enables organizations to detect and fix issues before they become major problems, leading to greater reliability. DevOps also promotes a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement, helping organizations to optimize their software delivery processes continuously. This results in improved efficiency, increased innovation, and greater scalability and reliability.
3. Process Automation
DevOps focuses on automating manual processes and workflows that can obstruct an organization from increasing the speed and quality of software. Consistency and risk of human error are major challenges when performing complex and repetitive tasks. DevOps overcomes these challenges by integrating tools and technologies that automate different stages of the software delivery pipeline, such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring and feedback.
Process automation enables teams to focus and deliver high-quality software by freeing time for more strategic tasks. This idea can be backed up by the thoughts from Dare Olufunmilayo, Principal DevOps Mentor at darey.io, “Without adopting DevOps, business owners and IT managers generally have little confidence in their software products. Practicing DevOps with its CI/CD concepts helps to achieve fast and quality software release. This is the main benefit DevOps brings to a business, amongst many others.”
4. Stable Operating Environments
DevOps relies on Infrastructure as Code, where provisioning of servers and software/packages can be done through well-tested code. Moreover, the code can be version-controlled and put into a source code management system (like Git). This has immense benefits as the code can be peer-reviewed, tracked and audited.
Therefore, if something created from the code malfunctions or doesn’t behave properly, anyone with access to the repository can check and find out the problem. They can also roll back to a functioning version of the system. By implementing testing and enabling organizations to deploy software with fewer errors, DevOps ensures a stable operating environment.
5. Faster, Better Product Delivery
A key client satisfaction factor is delivery punctuality. Enterprises can divide massive projects into smaller, functionally distinct components using DevOps approaches. DevOps has the benefit of enabling faster and better product delivery by promoting feedback from all facets of the software development process – stakeholders, developers and operations.
“DevOps renews focus on customers and unites teams to ship their applications faster. It forces developers to own their toolchain end-to-end to develop, deploy and operate their services. This leads to true continuous delivery and increased agility across the team. This has been a great step ahead in how teams think about code and workflow ownership,” says Luca Galante, DevOps Solutions at Humanitec.
6. Cost Reduction
By automating manual processes, streamlining workflows, and reducing lead time, DevOps enables organizations to deliver software faster and more frequently, reducing the costs associated with slow and inefficient software delivery processes.
Further, DevOps has the added benefit of lowering the cost of promotion and release by eliminating time-consuming reconfiguration for various environments. You write once and run everywhere with DevOps. The disadvantages of creating something that “only operates on one machine” are never an issue. It functions similarly in development, testing, and production thanks to creating scripts that can run in any environment.
Moreover, recruiting new team members and shifting individuals between teams are less expensive because of DevOps and automation. Building strong CI/CD pipelines encourages new engineers to have Day 1 contributions, something that was previously not even thought of.
7. Improved Communication and Collaboration
A strong DevOps team is built on the foundations of shared accountability, openness, and quick feedback. As Luca Galante adds, “DevOps was born out of the need to reunite engineering teams and prevent developers from simply ‘throwing their code over the fence’ to overwhelmed sys admins, who had to figure out then how to deploy it onto their infrastructure.”
The systems concept espoused by DevOps is frequently not followed by teams that operate in silos—knowing how your actions impact not only your team but also every other group assembled in the release process. Lack of common goals and visibility leads to poor dependence, mismatched priorities, finger-pointing, and a ‘not our fault’ attitude, slowing progress and lowering quality.
DevOps is a mentality shift that removes the silos between different disciplines in the development process. It promotes the formation of cross-functional teams, enabling teams to work together more closely and effectively and stay up-to-date with each other’s progress through regular meetings. Read our presentation of the steps to building effective DevOps teams to understand the roles involved and the overall structure they participate in.
8. Higher Team Productivity & Efficiency
DevOps advocates development and operations must be coordinated from the start. This has the benefit of helping to determine precise objectives that could guarantee coordination between development, operations, and the other parts of the organization.
It’s also critical to remember that DevOps’s goal goes beyond just getting the three groups to coordinate on a particular course of action. It actually seeks to ensure coordination between application development, IT operation, and the remainder of the company in daily business operations. As a result, it can help all three groups to create a sustained joint commitment to a set of shared objectives. This commitment has proven to speed up application development, reduce feedback delays, and enable faster application release.
9. Fast Feedback Implementation and Adopting Experimentation
DevOps relies heavily on CI/CD pipelines that automate software building, testing, and deploying. Automated processes enable organizations to detect and resolve issues quickly.
The other benefit of DevOps is that teams are better aligned to understand the issues of each of their members when they are working collaboratively. Peer reviews and testing results allow teams to receive feedback and reach issue resolution quickly.
Moreover, Continuous Improvement in DevOps emphasizes that all the organization’s stakeholders should be heard and their feedback implemented. When the processes are automated, receiving the feedback becomes easier and faster and so does the time required to implement them.
Since DevOps relies on a consistent, repeatable pattern using Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD pipelines, this helps organizations to adopt the culture of rational experimenting. Because if something goes wrong in the experiment, it is relatively straightforward to restore the service. Further, “this is what makes a team win,” says Ricardo Bejerano, Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Landbot, as “the cultural change underpinning continuous experimentation shifts how the whole organization sees risk: as a feature, not a bug.”
10. Improved Customer Satisfaction
Imagine a situation where a bug is discovered in the production environment when your customer is at a critical point in their business. Every software is subjected to errors and bugs. However, the time an organization takes to resolve the issue is what separates good software from mediocre software.
Practicing DevOps benefits organizations in that they can deliver robust software quickly, enabling faster time-to-market and improving customer satisfaction. They can also respond more rapidly to the ever-changing business environment. The DevOps model
ensures that the software is always running, well-tested, and high quality. This assures your customers and improves their satisfaction.
How Sematext Can Benefit DevOps Teams
In the dynamic realm of software development and operations, DevOps is pivotal in driving collaboration, agility, and efficient application delivery. As organizations strive to streamline their development and operations processes, they increasingly turn to cutting-edge solutions offering tangible benefits. One such solution that stands out is Sematext Cloud, a powerful and all-encompassing cloud monitoring platform designed to help DevOps teams overcome the challenges to the model.
Sematext offers out-of-the-box dashboards mapping out the key application and infrastructure metrics you should focus on. This intuitive approach means that DevOps teams can initiate monitoring with minimal setup time, freeing them to focus on higher-value tasks. On top of that, it features services autodiscovery, which lets them automatically start monitoring services directly through the user interface.
Sematext Cloud’s benefits extend to its alerting engine, which boasts powerful anomaly detection and scheduling capabilities. When anomalies are detected, the platform promptly notifies the relevant stakeholders through their preferred communication channels. This proactive alerting mechanism swiftly addresses potential issues, maintaining operational efficiency.
With all its functionalities, Sematext Cloud helps you keep the lifecycle process of the modern application stack intact, which results in faster processing, deployment and delivery.
Watch the video below to learn how Sematext Cloud can help you and your DevOps team. Or sign up for the 14-day free trial to test it out.
Sematext Cloud | Full Stack Visibility in One Place | A Cloud Monitoring solution
Conclusion
DevOps is a collaborative approach to software development and operations that aims to automate processes, improve communication and collaboration, and deliver high-quality software faster and more reliably. DevOps practices offer numerous benefits, including faster time-to-market, increased reliability and quality, improved customer satisfaction, increased agility, and reduced costs.
By adopting DevOps, organizations can improve their software delivery process and better meet the changing needs of their customers. The benefits of DevOps are clear, and organizations looking to stay competitive and respond to changing business needs should consider adopting a DevOps methodology.