How does DevOps help your organization

Introduction

In this digital era, organizations should be ready to meet the business innovations at a faster pace to serve and win the customers, without any compromise in the quality of deliverables. Apart from a flawless delivery, nowadays organizations are focussing on the value adds like faster time-to-market, better customer experience, cost savings and a lot more.

Digital transformation and cloud computing demands the businesses a unique working model to serve the frequently changing customer expectations. So the innovative ideas along with booming technology and optimized software development cycle are found to be the building blocks of a strong business model. Thus giving rise to a new culture called “DevOps”. The term is coined by combination of two terms “Development”(Dev) and “Operations”(Ops).

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DevOps is popular for its ability to focus on how to govern, track and automate any application lifecycle. This Blog talks about DevOps by definition, best practices/principles, key values, Lifecycle, and resources who help in adopting DevOps in organization. Document also outlines the benefits of adopting the DevOps culture in your organization.

According to a report by Global Market insights, " DevOps Market size exceeded $7 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 20% from 2022 to 2028 to a value of over $30 billion."

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices, tools and culture that streamline the software development process by breaking down the traditional barriers between development and operations teams. It emphasizes a cultural shift towards collaboration and communication between teams to create a more collaborative and integrated approach to software delivery.

Gartner said,”DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture), and it seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams”.

DevOps Principles

DevOps is not just a development and operations teams working together. It is a cultural shift, where teams understand and adopt a new way of working better. To achieve the full potential of DevOps, teams should stick to its principles. DevOps principles are:

• Continuous Integration and Delivery
• Infrastructure as Code
• Lean and Agile
• Shared responsibility
• Automation
• Monitoring and Feedback
• Security
• Embrace failure
• Gather continuous feedback

DevOps Lifecycle

DevOps lifecycle is the series of events or steps involved from planning to deployment. By adopting the different phases of DevOps any team can improve collaboration between development and operations teams, reduce time to market, and deliver software more efficiently and with better quality. Different phases of DevOps is shown in the picture below:

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Automation with DevOps

The whole process from developing a code to deployment takes place one by one without any manual interruptions in case there are no errors to be addressed. This has led to a new chain process called “Automation”. Automation is the fundamental aspect of DevOps. With this chain process, the human intervention could be reduced and manual errors are eliminated. This helps in delivering high precision output.

This process of automation focuses on setting up the automation pipeline, configuration and assisting the infrastructure. Server configuration and application deployment are the most crucial or critical tasks which are prone to human errors. Organizations needed highly skilled resources to perform these tasks.

This is where automation plays a major role in replacing manual resources with end-to-end software development and deployment processes. There are a lot of open source and commercial tools available to build this CICD pipeline. Every organization chooses its own tools that match its business strategy. The right combination of tools play a major role in creating a robust CICD pipeline.

Given below few benefits of Automation:

• ‍Speed - Automation does not need any manual setup or intervention and helps in speeding up the entire lifecycle
• ‍Quality - The continuous testing and quality assurance in the automation process ensures delivering high quality deliverables meeting the customer requirements.‍
• Consistency - Automation ensures that the process is executed in a consistent and reliable manner, excluding all the manual errors.

What Value does DevOps add to organizations?

Atlassian surveyed professionals about their success with DevOps, the barriers they faced, and the impact of tools and culture on their work and it revealed some very interesting statistics.

• 99% of respondents said DevOps has had a positive impact on their organization.
• 61% said it helped them produce higher-quality deliverables.
• 49% said they saw faster time to market.
• 49% said it improved their release cadences.

Adopting the DevOps culture helps organizations to respond faster to the evolving market needs and customer requirements while achieving the business goals. This also empowers the working teams with a cultural shift, enabling an improved workflow in IT operations. Listing below few core values that DevOps bring in to organizations:

1. Quick time-to-market:
   DevOps practices help teams to deliver at a faster rate with improved quality. The process of automating the entire backend to frontend flow helps the organization to accelerate the delivery lifecycle with new innovations and improvements.

2. Better efficiency and cost savings:
   End-to-end automation helps in reduced manual tasks and improved efficiency. They also reduce costs spent on man-hours and resolving manual errors.

3. Improved collaboration:
   Sharing responsibilities between development and operations teams bring in a more understanding cross-functional team. This collaboration helps in less communications gaps, reduced misunderstandings and better team morale and productivity.

4. Greater reliability:
   DevOps focuses more on CICD pipelines that help in detecting issues at early stages and reduced downtime. As a result, DevOps produces more reliable applications. 

5. Better customer-centric experience:
   With the automated lifecycle, organizations can respond to customers quickly catering their needs as soon as they identify. This real time feedback helps in better customer satisfaction.

6. Development and testing process:
   Using iterative agile methodologies able to achieve frequent incremental releases, with automated testing and continuous validations. This will also reduce remarkable risks and cost.

7. Infrastructure:
   Technology stack will be more organized and standardized. Metrics based monitoring tools are used to enhance the automated and organized infrastructure.

Case studies of organizations benefited from DevOps

Let's take a look at below two case studies demonstrating how Devops helps organization:

1. Docusign
   Docusign is an organization that helps with e-sign technology. They help their clients to prepare, sign, act on and manage the agreements. Previously, they adopted Agile methodology, which helped them in early stages. But when they had come up with a separate Development and Operations team, they missed the collaboration between both the team and this was the issue underlay in most of the failures they faced.
   
   It is then they switched to DevOps culture and their business also demanded a continuous integration and delivery. It was no way a cakewalk for them and they face serious challenges due to their business needs. 
   
   For such an organization who lives and dies for the transaction, any signature or approval goes wrong then it would be a very serious issue. With DevOps culture and its modern development speed, they leveraged an application mockup tool for their internal API. The tool helped them in generating very close real life exchanges to test the application.
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2. Netflix
   Back to early stages of 2019, Netflix faced few outages during registration and transaction. That persisted until they made a switch to DevOps culture. Netflix is a large distributed system hosted on AWS. Since they had many components linked together, engineers focussed more on quality and reliability. They practiced failures and automated the same, with the help of DevOps culture, to achieve desired level of confidence and quality.
   
   “Our journey to the cloud at Netflix began in August of 2008, when we experienced a major database corruption and for three days could not ship DVDs to our members. That is when we realized that we had to move away from vertically-scaled single points of failure, like relational databases in our datacenter, towards highly reliable, horizontally-scalable, distributed systems in the cloud” stated Yury Izrailevsky, the VP of cloud computing operations of Netflix.
   
   Netflix took little time and faced challenges in moving to a collaborative work culture. But as soon as they made it, they achieved frequent releases, quick automations and reliable applications.

DevOps benefits in a nutshell

Overall, DevOps helps organizations to become more agile, efficient, and responsive to changing customer needs, at the same time a noticeable improvement in team collaboration and productivity could be seen. Below are key devops advantages: 

1. Ensures reliable and stable application lifecycle
2. Accelerated software delivery with continuous release and deployment 
3. Faster time-to-resolution and less downtime
4. Improved software quality and more time for innovation
5. Increased efficiency and cost savings
6. Improved collaboration between development and operations team
7. Increased accountability and transparency
8. Improves ROI, the key to any business success
9. Mitigates risk at early stage by reducing time to delivery
10. Identifies problems and provide smooth resolutions
11. Better customer experience and satisfaction
12. Enhanced software functionality and features based on customer feedback

FAQs

Q1. What is a DevOps engineer?

A DevOps engineer holds a broader skill set to collaborate between two important teams development and operations. They also require good interpersonal skills and communication skills to bridge between different teams. They adhere to the DevOps principles, methodologies and effectively integrate the complete lifecycle from idea to delivery.

The role of a DevOps engineer will vary from one organization to another, but it mostly involves a combination of software developer/tester, release manager, infrastructure provisioning and management, system administration, automation expert, security engineer, and DevOps advocacy.
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Q2. What is CI/CD in DevOps?

Continuous Integration(CI) involves integration of code developed by several developers in the team that are shared to a common repository tool several times a day or as on when needed. This happens without any conflict between developed code or changed code. The goal of CI is to detect errors or bugs at the early stage and address the same timely. Also, it helps in providing feedback during the development lifecycle. 

Continuous Delivery(CD) is the next step to CI. It involves automatically deploying the code to a specific environment after it passed all the tests. In this staging environment, developed code could be tested just in a production-like environment before delivering it into production. Continuous Deployment(CD) is the step further to continuous delivery, where the actual code is deployed to production after passing all the tests in the staging environment. All the codes which passed the staging environment will not be deployed to production, only those which show a functional stability and reliability will be deployed.
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Q3. Is DevOps part of agile?

Let's try to understand how do agile and devops interrelate . 

It could be said that DevOps is a “complementary” to Agile methodologies, as it extends its focus on Operations too, to make a high value production ready product.

Agile software development process aids to business agility. DevOps aids to IT agility that leads to increased automation with reliable and predictable release cycles by incorporating Agile methodologies. Development, testing and deployment occurs in both Agile and DevOps, but traditional Agile focuses less on operations, which is an integral part of DevOps.
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Q4. What are the goals of DevOps?

• Collaborated teams
• Welcoming attitude on a change request
• Quick turnaround time
• Reduced cost, effort and time
• Achieving Automated and standardized process 
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Q5. What are the metrics used to measure DevOps benefits?

• Reduced % of defects in UAT and pre-production
• Reduced % of overall release time
• Reduced % of manual efforts and errors
• Increased % of code coverage
• Increased % of overall release quality 
• Increased % of team productivity

Conclusion

“DevOps is not a goal, but a never-ending process of continual improvement.”

- Jez Humble, Founder and CTO, DevOps Research and Assessment

To the crisp, DevOps is not just implementing CICD process in place and automating end-to-end lifecycle. It is a fundamental cultural and attitude shift of how an application or software is developed and managed. 

There Is no doubt that any organization could create a robust DevOps process and deliver a quality product by adhering to its principles and best practices. Organizations by integrating with the right kind of tools could provide end-to-end value with minimal errors and a flexible product to meet the customer needs and market demands.

Most statistics demonstrate that the growing adoption of DevOps practices and the significant impact on any organization leads to delivering high-quality software quickly and reliably.