The Benefits of DevOps

Curious about what adopting DevOps practices can do for your company’s workflows? Here are some of the main benefits of implementing DevOps in your operation.

Much like the way modern software is updated with each cyclical release, many of today’s most innovative developers are on a quest to continually refine and improve their production processes. Finding new ways to strengthening your company’s development practices and workflows can lead to better products and happier clients, but implementing these philosophies and doing so effectively takes a commitment to excel.

Building on principles of popular agile development practices, DevOps is a cultural shift companies are embracing to enhance their software production cycles and improve the ways their teams operate across the board. This philosophy aims to foster greater collaboration between development and operations teams while reducing risk and speeding up the entire production process.

Faster development through shorter cycles.

Bridging the gap between development and operations teams brings greater collaboration to the table. Having everyone involved and in the loop from the get-go can dramatically shorten the time it takes to bring code from the engineering phase into final, production-ready, executable code. The enhanced speed that comes from implementing shorter, more frequent development cycles creates lasting benefits that resonate throughout your operation.

For today’s SaaS (software as a service) business model, it’s important to keep up with the needs and demands of your userbase in order to thrive in the hyper-competitive tech sector. DevOps embraces a process of continuous development and deployment, and shorter development cycles mean you can release code into production at a much faster rate — even hourly, if you prefer. This makes it possible to respond and adapt to your customers at a speed that keeps them satisfied with your product.

Better bug detection and minimal rollbacks.

The collaborative nature of the DevOps approach makes the process of detecting and stomping bugs in your code a much easier task across the team. With more eyeballs seeing the work frequently, detecting bugs and potential issues with the code becomes a natural part of the workflow. The modular nature of working with smaller programming blocks centered around digestible features makes the code more manageable, too, which can aid in bug detection at every stage of development.

Greater oversight throughout the process also makes each release more dependable, cutting down on the number of issues both before and after deployment of each release. This minimizes the number of unnecessary rollbacks and frees up team members to focus on other areas of development.

Reduced deployment failures and faster recovery.

In software development, it’s almost inevitable that something will go awry with your code somewhere along the line, but the less often this happens and the faster you recover, the sooner you can get back to improving your product. DevOps embraces a mindset that looks at both the bigger picture business needs of your software as well as the engineering and code development. Combining operational and development viewpoints can make a big difference in identifying issues before they reach deployment.

When things do occasionally go wrong, having the whole team working cohesively makes for significantly faster recovery times and facilitates a better understanding of what can go wrong and how to fix it. Adoption of DevOps practices continues to grow across the tech center, with research predicting that 60 percent of IT organizations will incorporate this approach into the culture of their organization by 2021.