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DevOps Benefits for Business: What Does DevOps Do?

Wondering what does DevOps do in terms of benefits for business? In our post, we are reviewing main benefits of employing DevOps and risks of neglecting it.

It is clear that DevOps is confusing. We clarify what DevOps is, what does DevOps do, and how it assists businesses in gaining an edge over the competition in this article.

The DevOps movement revolutionized IT in 2009 when it was started.

Development and operations, or DevOps, is a way to bridge six traditionally siloed departmental areas: development (dev), quality assurance (QA), and operations (ops).

With DevOps, departments can efficiently create quality applications and deliver them quickly to end-users. Customers and employees benefit from DevOps by eliminating communication and collaboration barriers in an IT company.

The apps are user-friendly and are regularly updated based on customer feedback. Additionally, DevOps helps companies increase revenue, reduce operational costs, and become more competitive by improving agility (the ability to respond rapidly to change).

Having a wealth of DevOps consulting experience and knowledge about its methodologies, we can say that implementing it may present a significant challenge. DevOps consultants or engineers trained in DevOps are crucial to businesses transitioning to DevOps.

This article is crafted to highlight the business benefits of DevOps and guide you in selecting skilled DevOps professionals for your needs. Additionally, it delves into understanding the significant DevOps benefits for businesses and finding the ideal partner for successful implementation.

What Is DevOps?

DevOps Benefits for Business: What Does DevOps Do?
DevOps in the software industry

In the software industry, DevOps is a method of aligning the development, QA, and operations teams in order to deliver innovation faster (i.e., apps and services) in the software industry. By implementing DevOps, the development process can also be optimized from idea to end-user.

Developers and operations are able to effectively communicate and collaborate in a frictionless environment to accomplish the company’s goals, including:

  • Improved app release timelines
  • A higher level of quality in-app releases
  • Detect and fix bugs quickly
  • The faster turnaround between fixes
  • Nonexistent downtime

DevOps environments run any software continuously through its software development lifecycle. The software delivery lifecycle involves planning, coding, building, testing, releasing, deploying, operating, and monitoring steps.

Automation tools must be implemented to achieve continuous software delivery, as well as continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines. Ansible, Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, and Maven are some of the best business process automation tools.

With DevOps, a team of developers creates builds, runs tests, deploys software, monitors performance, and gets feedback continuously and automatically.

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Who Is a DevOps Professional?

Businesses need DevOps services to establish such an environment. DevOps professionals must be certified in these three areas:

In order to become a DevOps professional, you need to be certified in these 3 areas:

  1. Scripting or coding
  2. Infrastructure and process re-engineering
  3. Collaborating and communicating with others

Typically, a DevOps professional can oversee the entire software development and release lifecycle, starting with ideation and planning and continuing through development and testing to product delivery and feedback analysis.

A major part of the job responsibilities of DevOps professionals includes monitoring failed builds, automating build pipelines, and managing infrastructure. However, they also have cultural responsibilities.

They share their knowledge of DevOps principles, values, and best practices with stakeholders. Instilling a DevOps culture ensures that QA, development, and operations departments don’t work in silos but rather collaborate seamlessly together.

DevOps experts ensure that all stakeholders – from executives to operations – are committed to delivering value as part of their responsible and shared culture.

DevOps professionals ultimately create business value by bringing developers and their code closer to end-users. Customers are provided with feedback loops in which:

  • Application access is provided to customers.
  • Its features and performance are rated by customers.
  • Feedback is measured and analyzed by the business.
  • The developers implement changes based on feedback.
  • Apps are pushed to customers by developers.
  • Repetition of the process occurs.

It’s all performed continuously under DevOps’ supervision.

What Are the Business Objectives of DevOps?

So, what exactly are companies trying to achieve when implementing DevOps? Clearly, leaders don’t make this decision just because they want to keep up with the latest trends. They see DevOps as a strategic priority only if it helps drive higher profits and increase efficiency.

So, let’s break down the major business goals that are motivating companies to pursue DevOps.

Faster time-to-market

DevOps promises to dramatically accelerate the software delivery timeline. Teams following DevOps principles can ship updates much quicker, thanks to practices like continuous integration and delivery.

Continuous integration is a core DevOps practice that allows developers to frequently merge code changes into a shared main branch multiple times per day. Automated testing then kicks off to check for errors and failures. If issues crop up, developers get immediate notification to fix them before vulnerabilities get baked into the codebase.

This is a huge improvement compared to more traditional workflows that only integrate big code pieces once a week or month. The faster companies can turn out new features and fixes, the faster they can generate revenue, attract new customers, and beat the competition.

Better resource utilization

The traditional model of one application per physical server leads to inefficient capacity use. Servers inevitably end up overwhelmed as workloads shift. And scaling requires purchasing more units ahead of the predicted peak demand.

Docker provides lightweight containerization, so multiple workloads run on the same underlying host. Containers package up apps and dependencies into standard units that are isolated, portable, and platform-agnostic. Companies can consolidate many containers onto smaller server footprints for optimum density. 

But running containers at scale requires advanced coordination with Kubernetes, the orchestration platform purpose-built for container deployments. As demand changes, Kubernetes can horizontally scale out containers via simple commands. 

Together, Docker and Kubernetes deliver massively improved resource utilization. The same resources can now flexibly serve a wide range of modular, decoupled workloads without overprovisioning. 

Thus, companies no longer pay for idle excess resources. Infrastructure can scale up and down dynamically based on real-time demand signals. This way, teams can operate with fewer resources but respond timely during traffic spikes.

Increased innovation velocity

The traditional model of massive, monolithic releases requires long development cycles and extensive upfront testing to minimize business risk. This approach severely limits innovation at a fast pace.

DevOps and agile practices like continuous delivery encourage taking an incremental, iterative approach instead. 

First, small changes simplify isolating the impact of new features or upgrades. Teams can confirm new capabilities work as expected with less convoluted rollback paths.

Second, incremental advances reduce risk. Rather than re-architecting systems, teams make localized changes and handle unforeseen issues before they arise.

And third, faster turnaround on changes means accelerated feedback loops from both internal testers and external customers. Teams can incorporate learnings much quicker to systematically improve quality over time.

Together, these benefits enable companies to accelerate innovation cycles while keeping risk in check:

  • Trying out new technologies goes from multi-quarter efforts to fast pilots
  • Experimentation becomes integrated into the development culture
  • Engineers can research cutting-edge capabilities like machine learning without high-cost projects
  • Both successes and failures progress capabilities faster via feedback loops

This fail-fast, learn-faster formula powered by DevOps enables software-driven organizations to increase their innovation velocity and out-experiment the competition.

Enhanced security

Many organizations struggle to build security into their software development lifecycles. Too often, security reviews and testing happen only right before production deployment, slowing releases down. DevOps offers a better approach that tightly integrates security practices into continuous development and delivery workflows.

With DevOps, security scans can be inserted directly into code commit pipelines. Unit, integration, and performance tests are also expanded to include security test cases. Therefore, application vulnerabilities surface rapidly as code gets checked during automated testing. Issues can be fixed straightaway by developers without waiting until pre-production. 

Likewise, infrastructure provisioning and configuration processes are augmented to validate that compliance criteria are met automatically across lower environments. Embedding security checks this way catches problems systematically without compromising release velocity. Furthermore, with DevOps tight monitoring and feedback loops, abnormalities can also be continually flagged through log analytics. 

Thus, integrating security into DevOps workflows provides manifold business benefits — it reduces risk exposure through earlier threat detection and faster response, improves operational efficiency through automation, and enhances customer trust and loyalty by minimizing business disruptions.

What Are the Benefits of DevOps for Businesses

 
DevOps Benefits for Business: What Does DevOps Do?
The Benefits of DevOps for Business in 2024

Let’s delve into ‘How Does DevOps Benefit a Business?’ by exploring the advantages of implementing DevOps in a business context. Here are five key business benefits of DevOps:

  1. Agility is improved
  2. Enhanced efficiency in operations
  3. Profitability and revenue growth
  4. Customer satisfaction and experience improved
  5. Competitiveness strengthened

Impact of DevOps on agility

When it comes to DevOps, agility means delivering innovation and value rapidly.

A report released by Puppet, the State of DevOps, lists organizations with DevOps on board as deploying code 46x faster, recovering from failures 96x faster, and implementing changes 440x faster than those without DevOps.

Workflow efficiency improvement

In DevOps, redundant manual tasks are greatly reduced due to automation, allowing employees to work more effectively.

It is said that DevOps increases employee productivity by 51% while reducing the complexity of app development by 26%, according to CA Technologies’ report, “Accelerating Velocity and Customer Value with Agile and DevOps.” As a result, the organization will experience lower operational costs.

Growing revenue with DevOps

Many companies adopt DevOps methodologies expecting improved software delivery and reliability, but they’re often pleasantly surprised by the revenue growth that results. That’s because DevOps acceleration and collaboration between developers and operations leads to far faster iteration and innovation. And faster innovation directly translates to faster revenue growth.

Here’s why. DevOps automation around building, testing, and deployment allows companies to accelerate the pace they can release new features and fix bugs. That improved responsiveness to customer needs and market opportunities directly generates more sales. Bugs that would have taken weeks to fix pre-DevOps now get addressed in hours or minutes. New features that would have missed critical selling seasons now make it to market with time to gain traction. Velocity drives revenue growth.

Second, DevOps practices dramatically expand deployment flexibility and experimentation capabilities. Leveraging infrastructure as code and containerization, teams can now test cutting-edge features with select customer segments and explore new ideas without high risk.

And third, freeing up developers from operational fires and technical debt pays exponential dividends. By implementing automated monitoring, companies gain insight into system health and performance like never before. Engineers spend less time reactively fighting fires and more time innovatively developing new solutions.

Improved employee engagement

Improved employee engagement is a critical benefit of DevOps that is often overlooked. Adopting DevOps is not just about tools and automation — it requires changing team culture and organization. Done right, DevOps can massively boost employee engagement. 

Many software teams struggle with low morale and a lack of empowerment. Developers often feel that releases are dictated without their input. Testers’ manual work feels like a tedious chore. Deployment mistakes ruin weekends for ops. 

DevOps transforms these roles from assembly line workers into product owners. Because DevOps brings down barriers between steps, each role gains greater understanding and appreciation for the others.

Developers gain empathy for operations by doing production deployments themselves. Testers gain respect by advocating for quality and mentoring developers in testing. Ops transform into SREs (site reliability engineers), ensuring uptime and performance.

This breakdown of previous specialized silos gives a sense of end-to-end ownership and responsibility.

Enhanced customer satisfaction

Research conducted by CA Technologies shows that companies adopting DevOps experience a 45% improvement in customer satisfaction along with a 74% improvement in customer experience.

What business does not want more satisfied customers? Happier clients mean expanded sales, positive word-of-mouth, and long-term loyalties. However, traditional software delivery often creates barriers between users and technical teams directly able to address frustrations.

DevOps accelerates detecting and resolving defects and dysfunctions that frustrate users. Minimum viable increments focus on moving value along with code. Bugs and failures become treated as opportunities. Iterative delivery gets powered by feedback loops connecting users to product teams. Monitoring tracks usage patterns to guide ongoing improvements.

The outcomes speak clearly. Issues get resolved faster, while defect prevention comes from continuous quality practices. And, of course, fostering an empathetic culture that adds value builds durable mutual satisfaction between providers and customers.

Boost to competitiveness

Staying competitive in business is tough these days. New technologies appear constantly. Customer expectations keep rising. Other companies try to take your customers. How do you keep up? Many companies think they need to hire more developers. But what if you could get more from the engineers you already have? That’s the DevOps way.

DevOps brings all contributors — developers, testers, operations, security — together. It uses automation to turn manual efforts into reusable tools. Automation handles repetitive tasks, so people focus on innovation.

This way, DevOps streamlines development cycles. As a result, improvements reach customers sooner, while customer feedback informs constant tuning of priorities. Plus, issues get diagnosed faster through shared understanding. Universal visibility exposes what’s working and what’s not. Ultimately, DevOps boosts competitiveness by unlocking potential from your existing teams, while this progress accelerates improvements further.

Decreased risks: Without DevOps, companies risk inefficiency and mistakes

Adopting DevOps can pay off big time for companies looking to reduce risk and improve products. Instead of long release cycles, DevOps gets everyone collaborating daily. Developers own what they build end-to-end, so when bugs inevitably crop up, they fix them fast. Testing starts on day one, too, baking quality instead of inspecting it later.

And with infrastructure-as-code, server changes become simpler. The whole culture shifts left, catching errors early and often. Plus, constant monitoring means fewer late-night emergency calls too. For old-school companies, DevOps may sound risky. But once adopted, it removes bottlenecks, secures velocity, and reduces human error.

Parallel to this, study DevOps Support Services.

It is important for companies like that to prepare both their people and technology in order to maintain their competitive advantage. Their infrastructure needs to be improved, configurations updated, existing processes automated and cleaned up, new tools introduced, and configuration management pipelines properly adjusted, and thus, they have a need for DevOps. Continue your exploration with IT Outposts’ DevOps Outsourcing Services.

How to Choose the Right DevOps Professional

If you’re looking to bring DevOps professionals onto your team, it’s definitely a smart move. With the right DevOps talent, you can transform how your engineers build, test, and release software. Everything will get faster and more reliable. But finding that stellar candidate can feel overwhelming. Where do you start? What skills should you look for? Let us break it down for you.

When evaluating DevOps engineers, you need to assess both technical and soft skills. Let’s start with the technical skills. You’ll want someone who has experience with:

  • Major DevOps tools like Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, and cloud platforms like AWS. Your DevOps experts should know how to set up and manage Kubernetes clusters, deploy containerized workloads, and debug issues with containers or the cluster. Experience with Terraform is also essential these days for defining, provisioning, and managing infrastructure as code across cloud platforms like AWS.
  • CI/CD pipelines for automating testing and delivery. The engineer should be proficient with tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, TravisCI, or GitLab to automate builds, tests, and deployments. They should know techniques for optimizing and parallelizing builds to provide fast feedback.
  • Infrastructure as code tools to standardize environments. Using a business process automation platform like Ansible to standardize and automate environment provisioning is also key for DevOps. The engineer should know how to define infrastructure resources, dependencies, and configurations in code to create templated, reproducible environments for development, testing, and production.
  • Monitoring stacks to track performance and reliability. Finally, experience setting up monitoring and observability stacks is important to get insights into infrastructure, application performance, and operational health. The DevOps engineer should have worked with business process workflow software like Prometheus, Grafana, Elasticsearch, Nagios, Datadog, or New Relic for gathering metrics, aggregating logs, and building dashboards.

Basically, you need your candidates to prove they can build and run a high-velocity software delivery machine. Make sure to ask about specific tools they’ve used to automate workflows, deploy code, and support robust operations. 

But DevOps is more than just tech. It represents an entire cultural shift in how engineers work. You want someone who can also change mindsets and rally people to embrace new ways of developing and delivering software.

That’s where soft skills come in. Look for these critical human strengths:

  • Collaboration. Can your potential DevOps team bring various teams together in fast-paced sprints? Assess if they can facilitate collaboration and break down siloes between those groups. Look for experience actively removing obstacles for developers, building bridges between teams, and fostering a shared-ownership culture.
  • Communication. DevOps engineers often serve as interpreters between an organization’s technical and non-technical departments. Ensure candidates can clearly explain technical topics to senior leaders and other business stakeholders who may not possess technical backgrounds. They should be able to communicate operational realities and tradeoffs in easy to grasp terms to executives. That skill makes all the difference in aligning priorities.
  • Innovation. Is your potential DevOps team excited by new technologies and approaches? You need candidates excited by innovations like serverless computing, AIops, CI/CD optimization, and more.
  • Patience. Will your potential DevOps team coach teams patiently on new tools and processes? Or do they get frustrated easily? Changing processes requires empathy. Look for mentorship abilities and the willingness to inspire change gently through guidance.
  • Prioritization. Can your potential DevOps team focus engineers on the 20% of work that drives 80% of outcomes? You need someone who can identify and align teams to focus on what will make the biggest impact first with DevOps’ ways of working.

The right candidate will comfortably wear many hats — technologist, teacher, collaborator, and innovator. Therefore, look beyond just computer science degrees or traditional sys admin backgrounds. Find DevOps professionals who are smart, adept learners, and passionate about this transformative way of working. 

Summary: Why Your Business Needs a DevOps Engineer

The DevOps wave is still rolling, so your business can benefit from more lean and smooth operations from developers, testers, and operations teams, along with a better customer experience and shorter sales cycle.

For your DevOps plan to succeed, however, you need to invest time in learning more. Reach out to trained professionals – DevOps engineers and DevOps consultants – to help realize your DevOps vision. 

By establishing a DevOps culture, setting up the best business process automation tools, and optimizing processes, DevOps pros will help you create more disciplined teams and improve your organization’s infrastructure.

The business benefits of DevOps are long-term. If you want your business to succeed, consider hiring a DevOps pro

Feel free to contact IT Outposts if you need DevOps services or if you have any questions. As a leading provider of DevOps services for businesses of all sizes, we have an impressive track record.

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