What is DevOps and why companies should not ignore its importance?

Aug 24, 2021 |
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DevOps is gaining popularity at a rapid rate in software companies around the world as it enables companies to create and improve products at a faster rate than they could with traditional approaches. DevOps includes a set of processes that lets development and operations teams work together in completing software development.

The word DevOps is derived from Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops). It stands for the organizational approach to enable faster development of applications and easier maintenance of existing deployments by creating stronger bonds between development and operations teams.

But DevOps is not simply the collaboration of teams. It also means the adoption of best practices in software development, setting up automations and introducing new tools. The processes are usually initiated with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), real-time monitoring, incident response systems and collaboration platforms.

Companies are adopting DevOps as their method to develop softwares at a fast rate. In fact, International Data Corporation (IDC) says that the DevOps software market will reach $6.6 billion value in 2022. That is a massive growth from the $2.9 billion of 2017. And we can think of a few reasons why.

DevOps significantly shortens the operations’ cycle times. When development and operations teams work separately, it is much more difficult to tell if an application will be ready for operations. And the operations team has to go through an extended cycle for every application the development team just turned in.

When the two teams work simultaneously, these cycles are shorter which means faster software creation. This is a very important factor in most companies. Because in the fast-paced world of softwares, the company that can innovate faster and improve faster gets the success over its competitors. DevOps is all about fuelling that transformation in your business.

DevOps reduces deployment failures due to programming defects. As the shorter development cycles promote more frequent code releases, spotting defects in code becomes easier. Using Agile programming principles, teams can reduce the number of programming defects. Rollbacks are also easier to manage when using DevOps methods.

However, DevOps doesn’t mean there won’t be any errors. No code is written perfectly the first time. But it does mean when development and operations teams work together during development, recovery from programming defects is going to be much faster.

DevOps promotes collaboration within the whole company. When you combine teams within your company, chances are it’ll improve their level of satisfaction and productivity. Development and operations teams don’t work towards separate goals anymore. Their combined goal is to improve performance. Innovations and experiments are more effective and the teams’ focus shifts towards getting the product to market on time.

DevOps tasks can be automated reducing the amount of manual work required. So your software engineers can focus on tasks that can not be automated. Your team can use acceleration tools to further improve efficiency. For example, when both the teams use one environment to work in, the time-consuming task of transferring data from one environment to another becomes unnecessary. Thus speeding your productivity.

The final benefit of DevOps is what we all want – reduced costs. According to Kevin Murphy, DevOps development teams require 35% less IT staff and 30% lower IT costs. Another analysis in an annual Accelerate State of DevOps Report has found that top performing DevOps organizations do far better on software development and deployment speed and stability. Sounds efficient and cost-effective, doesn’t it?

As mentioned before, the industry is adopting DevOps as their development strategy at a rapid rate. And now you know why. If it’s important to stay in the race for you and your company, you should also consider jumping in and take advantage of the added efficiency and lowered costs.

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