Introduction
DevOps brings the development team and the world of operational specialists together, with a core concept of removing the downfalls of these teams working in isolation. The Operational Team understands the business's goals, the target audience, and the relationships with users and customers. The Development Team, however, has a deeper comprehension of the technical side of the software or app, including testing and deployment. Combining the two teams creates a new, cohesive team or concept that considers all these aspects. Let’s explore the key benefits of DevOps and how it helps transform the delivery of a product.
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Increased Trust and Collaboration
Microsoft describes DevOps as a union of people, processes, and technology. Organizations that embrace this ethos naturally improve the communication between individuals, teams, and even entire departments. Members from across the organization can become involved in planning, developing, and delivering the application or software. The more successful an organization’s DevOps culture, the more the lines blur between specific roles. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t still experts in particular skills, but everyone’s input is valued.
Visibility of the development cycle is highly desirable, with open communication and collaboration the key to achieving this. Alignment of goals across teams creates a highly cohesive and positive company culture. According to BMC’s State of DevOps, the most successful companies benefiting from DevOps culture aren’t even using the term — they’re simply following the ethos every day.
Reduced Lead Time
Getting a software product to market is the top priority for many organizations. Of course, that doesn’t mean apps and software or their updates should be rushed. Research of the target audience, assessment of the success of current iterations, and testing are just a few of the steps involved in ensuring an app is "fit for purpose." All of these steps are faster for organizations that have a strong DevOps culture.
Many organizations may even follow a DevSecOps philosophy, where security is an intrinsic part of the DevOps architecture. Using highly secure third-party services, such as software repos, is essential for maintaining the highest levels of security.
Utilizing the information from operations and expertise from developers means that metrics from users and market research can feed directly into software development. This helps products become effective quicker, reducing lead time dramatically. DevOps encourages agility and flexibility, with deployment up to 6,750 times faster for organizations that fully embrace DevOps culture.
More Frequent Deployment
Organizations that follow the DevOps philosophy could release 208 times as often as those that don’t. That’s a very appealing statistic that paints DevOps in a very positive light. One of the key factors contributing to multiple releases and updates is the ability to include automated tasks such as review cycles and testing. Disparate teams lead to disparate processes, which makes everything take longer.
Sharing information among teams means that problems can be resolved faster. That means open and honest communication, ownership of mistakes, and fast responses from individuals and teams involved. Failing to embrace these ideals causes blockages in the release pipeline, reducing the number of times you can successfully deploy. Incorporating elastic and scalable tools into the DevOps architecture improves deployment frequency even further.
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Higher Quality End-Products
Developers who have access to feedback from users or customers can make meaningful improvements and updates fast. Genuine insights from your campaign managers can be used to make tweaks that improve users' experience the next time they turn the app on.
DevOps could also be the key to improved stability. According to Google, DevOps reduces the change fail rate by up to a factor of three. DevOps or DevSecOps also encourages higher and more adaptive security, with many benefits. Secure apps are more stable because they’re less prone to infiltration and manipulation, but experiencing fewer security issues also means less time spent fixing those issues. This saves money and streamlines the deployment journey.
Engaging input from diverse people with different experiences helps prevent developers from getting stuck in a rut. Gaining face-to-face feedback from members of the organization who perhaps don’t understand all the technicalities of the software provides an in-house customer touchpoint. A member of the operational team stating that a certain part of an app feels clunky or slow isn’t technical, but it’s exactly how external users will describe an issue. This can help issues come to light faster than when a development team works in isolation. Automating test and review systems also helps address issues and communicate them across the wider team.
DevOps also empowers teams to deal with unplanned work without that sense of panic. When things go wrong, teams that communicate effectively, prioritize processes and operational requirements, and effortlessly share the workload get problems fixed faster. That means happier users and a better reputation for the organization.
Additional Benefits of DevOps
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Evolution of in-house processes to support DevOps culture.
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Reduced fear of change and transformation.
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Increased rate of digital transformation across an entire organization.
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Reliable release cycles that increase user or customer confidence in a brand or organization.
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More driven, motivated teams.
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More adoption of cloud-based services.
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Reduced maintenance and resource management costs.
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Agility within app development encourages agile processes across the company.
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Similarly, when other areas of an organization see how removing the barriers between teams garners success, they may try similar practices, encouraging open and productive communication across the entire company.
Packagecloud for DevOps and Beyond
Packagecloud is a cloud-based service used for the simple distribution of software packages to your machines and environments. Packagecloud’s hosted repository enables DevOps-focused organizations to store all of the packages required by their organization, regardless of programming language or OS, and repeatedly distribute the required packages to the destination machines.
This improves the efficiency of your organization’s DevOps by empowering users to reliably, efficiently, and securely set up and update machines without the maintenance and upkeep of the type of infrastructure typically required to do that.
Check out the Packagecloud free trial and discover how simple it is to distribute packages throughout your whole organization. Eliminate concerns about the scaling, consistency, and security of your packages forever.
