Benefits of DevOps

I was at Gartner Symposium @ Goa recently on first week on November. Great show by Gartner team Kudos! It was a great platform to interact with many CXO/ CIO. I was also fortunate to have 1: 1 meetings with few of them. As a DevOps / ALM passionate guy I attended a session on Future of DevOps & it Benefits. Wonderful sessions, but there I realized that many senior folks have a big question that how DevOps will be benefited to them. They also wanted to know what the clear cut benefits from DevOps are. I tried to convince a few CIO, but not much. So thought to pen down benefits of DevOps in a simple way.

In today’s world a lot of Companies have adopted DevOps & lot are yet thinking to adopt ASAP. It’s pretty clear that Companies that incorporate DevOps practices get more done, plain and simple. They deploy code up to 30 times more frequently than their competition. And less than 50% of their deployments fail according to State of DevOps survey done by Puppet Labs in 2013.

Today the biggest shift in attitude in a DevOps environment is that there is one team composed of cross-functional team members including developers, QA, DBAs, business analysts, operations engineers and so forth. Collaboration across these different roles delivers many benefits.

# Business benefits:

• Faster delivery of features
• More stable operating environments
• More time available to add value (rather than fix/maintain)

# Technical benefits:

• Continuous software delivery
• Less complex problems to fix
• Faster resolution of problems

1. More deploys means faster time-to-market and continual improvement.

Continuous software delivery brings two huge factors of success to an organization. First, you can go from “idea” to working software faster in terms of initial project development. Then you can experiment on many different things for continuous incremental improvements of whatever your company measures, be it performance, sales or signups.

1. You don’t have to choose stability versus new features.

In a non-DevOps environment, there is often tension between introducing new features and stability. The development team is measured on the features they deliver to users while the operations team is measured on the stability of the system.

In a DevOps environment, a single team is responsible for delivering new features and stability. The combination of a shared code base, continuous integration, test-driven techniques and automated deploys, among other things, expose problems, in application code, infrastructure or configuration, earlier because the software isn’t “thrown over the wall” to Operations at the end of coding. Problems tend to be less complex because change sets are smaller. And resolution times are faster because team members don’t need to wait for a different team to troubleshoot and fix the problem.

1. Increased effectiveness.

There is enormous waste in a typical IT environment with people waiting for other people, other machines, new software or they are stuck solving the same problems over and over. People like to be productive in their work and the time spent churning cause’s frustration and unhappiness. When people get rid of the unsatisfying parts of their job and can instead spend that time adding value to the organization, everyone benefits.

Automated deployments and standardized production environments, key aspects of DevOps, make deployments predictable and free people from routine repetitive tasks to go do more creative things.

I believe I am able to touch down on the main benefits of DevOps. Will write on the life cycle of DevOps in the next post.

At the end  wanted to thank - Infoseption - who extended the Gartner invitation to me. A new start up in DevOps by my dear friend Venkat. You guys are doing great in- DevOps. No wonder you are the Pioneers of DevOps in India, be it DevOps Tools, DevOps Consulting, or DevOps Integration. I am happy to be a part of your journey &   Mentoring team Infoseption. I can see a bright future for DevOps along with Infoseption in India.

DevOps is the way to go ahead!