5 Reasons Why You Should Invest in DevOps

Today, almost all businesses depend heavily on software and immerse themselves in digitalization. It doesn't matter whether they sell software directly or use it actively for operations and workflow, there is still the need to adapt to vital continuous changes and automate the processes. In this case, the automation of the workflow involves not only the IT department, it engages all the departments within the organization. For example, a legal department and a sales team are closely connected through the automated contract creation. This, in its turn, exemplifies the strong tendency to digitalization, even if a company operates only offline.

Most significantly, digitalization refers to the software development companies since they chase to bite off bigger market share. To occupy the place under the Sun, they try to increase the number of feature releases and system updates, streamline the processes within the organization, and decrease the number of bugs and % of system downtime. Moreover, they want to do it as quickly as possible by shortening the lead time and vanishing the silos between the departments. That sounds easier than it is.

For traditional environments, the Dev and Ops would work separately in an organization. The dev team would develop the code while the ops would implement it and maintain the IT infrastructure. If any problem occurs, they start blaming each other instead of finding the solution. This gap between these two departments is very dangerous and creates a range of problems for software development companies. For example, teams don't communicate with each other and create absolutely incompatible units of the infrastructure or they don't obtain the needed information while there is no direct access to decision-makers. Sad but the truth.

The DevOps methodology was introduced in 2009 to improve the situation and make the software development process smoother. Additionally, DevOps aims to resolve almost all challenges faced before and break the silos between Dev and Ops. Under this approach, the whole team evolves T-shaped skills quickly and responds to market changes more actively.

In this article, we uncover how DevOps methodology helps organizations to run the business more efficiently and what the best practices are to achieve better results.

A Closer Look at DevOps

1. Return Investments in IT Faster

1. Operational excellence - the optimal way of how to support the development lifecycle and run applications efficiently.
2. Hardened security - principles of better data & systems protection and the best practices of how to utilize cloud capabilities for security hardening.
3. Reliability pillar - the desired state of the infrastructure when each its unit functions properly and performs its intended function appropriately.
4. Performance efficiency - the best practices in the most efficient way to utilize IT resources.
5. Cost Optimization - the practical approaches to run the workloads not only efficiently, but also cost-effective. This pillar helps to understand how to deliver more value at a lower price.

2. Lower monthly bills on IT infrastructure maintenance

• Properly established CI/CD pipelines within your workflow help to decrease the mean time to resolution (MTTR) and keep the focus of the dev team on features release and product quality enhancement. At the same time, automated tests guarantee that deployed in small batches code wouldn't affect the work of the entire system. If there is an unexpected bug, it wouldn't let it flee to the production environment. Decreased bugs rate (%) and mean time to resolution (if a bug nonetheless pops up) lead to avoiding technical debt and constant poorly working workarounds.
• Cloud migration solves the problem of inefficient resource utilization. TOP public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure ensure wise resource utilization through autoscaling and load balancing. Furthermore, they utilize the "pay-as-you-go" pricing model - i.e. you pay only for the resources you use.
• Infrastructure as Code is the basic DevOps principle allowing to automate the routine processes. IaC approach kills two birds with one stone: it removes the burden of infrastructure provisioning from the developers, allowing them to focus on product enhancement, and eliminates the possibility of human-caused errors. Moreover, infrastructure management becomes an affair of a few hours per week.
• Container orchestration tools, as well as private cloud providers, guarantee that your system utilized each free RAM and CPU efficiently. No more overprovisioning of the resources.

3. Improve Service Availability

• $100,000 per hour of reduced downtime (infrastructure)
• $500,000 - 1M per hour of reduced application failure time

• Infrastructure as Code (TOP tools - Terraform, Ansible, Pulumi) provides better platform stability due to automation of the routine tasks and elimination of human interference. In addition, infrastructure automation implies system consistency - i.e. your code is ALWAYS built in the same manner as always (so the process is fully standardized). So you will be able to predict how the system will respond to changes and make automated tests even more efficient.
• Streamlined CI/CD workflow, as well as IaC, help to catch incompatible updates with the system units and prevent their deployment to the production. Besides, CI/CD

4. Motivated and Engaged Employees

5. Improved Security and Fewer Risks

• Reduces incidents of failures
• Helps businesses adapt to market changes
• Creates automated test environments
• Makes way for resilient infrastructure
• Eliminates human errors through automation
• Improves compliance

Final Thoughts