5 Benefits of DevOps

Published on November 28, 2014, by Brian


DevOps, as discussed in last weeks blog, brings a number of benefits to software firms that need to quickly get their coded goose to market, so to speak. Most of these are tangible benefits, while some are unquantifiable advantages that certainly help deliver the goods. I’m going to run through 5 benefits here today; two technical, two business, and one unmeasurable.

Continuous Software Delivery

Increasing deployment speed requires that you upgrade your development environment with tools that are suitable for it, and you also acquire the knowledge to work effectively with them. This pushes a whole new level of technical competency onto your teams, and brings increased motivation as developers want to see the next version ship. Putting these talented motivated individuals in a place they want to be, and letting them deploy their creations, increases the feedback loop and helps create truly end-user focussed, technically competent products. And who doesn’t want that modern day instantaneous gratification high included in the deal?

Smaller Technical Problems

No point denying it. More bugs gonna happen! As with all speed increases you are going to see more faceplants. On the flip side though, because each new release is a smaller update, you end up with less major bugs. This usually allows you to either rollback until it’s fixed, or squash them during the next release cycle, without a major panic.

Being able to quickly resolve problems in this manner actually increases the stability of your platform. Issues are usually only freshly introduced, so the expertise is on hand to fix them quickly, and then you can deploy ASAP. This is something both sides of the deal want to see happen. Creators and users alike want to see progress.

Faster Feature Delivery

Features are what people pay for, even if marketing try and spin them as solutions or benefits. What is under the hood is what keeps the lights on. Getting features out there faster is what can make or break a company. If you lose out to a competitor and see your market share swiped, well, all the excuses won’t cut it if you can’t deliver!

Continuous integration, automated deployments, and standardized production environments let you get the minimum viable product up and running, and expose it to users immediately. This lets them get their hands on a new feature and get creative with what solution it really provides for them. This is a powerful competitive advantage for any company reliant on winning market share and demonstrating to customers that they are on top of their game and intent on providing real value fast! This also opens up more revenue streams for a
business, and with that you can plan better for the future.

Increased Effectiveness

In business, time is money, and there is no denying that! The question is always about making the best use of your time, and here is where DevOps really stands out. Typically in an IT setup there is a lot of wasted time, repetitive tasks, and twiddling of fingers while you wait for someone else to get their end finished.

Reducing this through a combination of new tools and effective practices helps squeeze the most out of every budget. This enables people to be productive in work and deliver higher quality, value-add output.

DevOps practices allow you to automated deployments, testing, and provisioning of services. This removes a lot of repetitive tasks from someones daily routine and lets people focus on what they are good at; being creative. This is what will really separate you from the crowd and put greater value into your feature set.

Job Satisfaction

Imagine a world where developers, system administrators, and QA engineers occasionally looked up from their terminal and smiled! A scary thought, but you have probably occasionally glimpsed that on release day, and just like an eclipse, it’s a rare and fleeting moment. The joy of DevOps is that you increase the eclipses, and people get to stand back and marvel at what they have made more frequently. And shouldn’t we all do that a little bit more? Beer in hand perhaps!

Additionally, the mindset switch from adversarial to collaborative and cooperative has helped these departments work well together in most instances and they end up gelling as a cohesive, gif powered, instant message driven unit. A tight bunch of DevQaOPs will gladly work together to ensure the whole nine yards is delivered on release day and nobody is getting a 2am phone call from an irate customer/manager intent on burning their ear off!

Deploying changes quickly and reliably is the future, and will put you ahead of the competition. Though, this old adage still applies, don’t deploy Friday evening!