Top 5 reasons why ‘DevOps is not Dead’

There is no slim possibility that users will bear with applications and software that demand downtime. Digital Transformation of business implies that customer experience is not disturbed, it must only enhance. There is no scope of hindering the operations or expecting a break for further development and deployment. Development and Testing needs to be continuous without any hiccups and breaks with the experience.

DevOps as a practice has been adopted widely by enterprises to accelerate the application development process, especially in a Digital Transformation scenario. It is considered to be a mash up between development and operations, where both the functions collaborate. The practice was introduced to overcome the gaps with other development and testing methodologies. One of the key benefits of implementing DevOps is to speed up the application development process and ensure seamless experience.

A report by Forrester titled ‘DevOps Best Practices: The Path To Better Application Delivery Results’ states ‘DevOps provides a proven set of practices that enable organizations to deliver applications more quickly to better connect with customers while simultaneously reducing both cost and risk. The results are profound, but achieving them requires focus and willingness to leave behind old ways of working and organizing.’

A reverse route, Why DevOps?

Industry experts and practitioners have been arguing over the benefits of DevOps and even suggesting how disruptive it can be for an organization. It is not just about adopting new tools and development scenarios. DevOps implies organizational revamp, where there is more and more collaboration and interchanging of responsibilities. The approach is much more practical when compared to contemporary methodologies such as Agile.

Looking at DevOps with a reverse approach can be interesting, which is to understand what DevOps isn’t. It is definitely not about implementing tools and deriving the benefits. A tool can help you track the progress or the activity, but the success totally depends on the overall organization strategy. DevOps doesn’t intend to eliminate the difference between Development and IT operations. It precisely implies collaboration and better delivery on a continuous basis. Innovation and experimentation is at the core of every DevOps strategy.

Furthermore, it is about achieving business agility and continuous delivery for both development and operations. While it is a relatively feasible approach for smaller companies or start-ups, larger organizations can take an incremental approach towards adopting DevOps. That way, the process doesn’t turn out to be disruptive, but cohesive. It will help organizations to transform their culture and encourage adoption of the practice.

Adopting DevOps can be a real enabler in all possible ways. It not only helps organizations to improve agility, but also spike up revenues, bring down the costs and stay competitive and innovative for the customers. A lot has been written and spoken on the same. However, we would like to revisit the topic in the light of a new perspective that suggests ‘DevOps is Dead’.

Innovation

As we already discussed, the core objective of every DevOps strategy is to foster innovation and experimentation. The methodology supports shorter development cycle, increase release velocity, and support early detection of issues. This helps teams to experiment with new features, collaborate on the infrastructure and development activity, detect issues and seamlessly release new features.

This is one of the key reasons why DevOps approach works for small and emerging enterprises with manageable structures. The decision making has to be faster and the working has to be much more flexible.

Early Defect Detection

With shorter releases and development cycles, it is pretty obvious that testing and development is a collaborative activity. This implies that defects get detected early and are rectified on time. Especially in a Digital Transformation scenario, organizations need early defect detection to stay confident about the application’s quality and robustness.

This further helps to reduce deployment failures and rollbacks. A rollback, breakdown, or data leak can be disastrous for an organization’s reputation in a competitive marketplace.

Stay Resilient

Cyberattacks and Cyber threats is a growing phenomenon in the digital scenario. The percentage of devastating Cyberattacks is surging constantly. Cyberattacks spiked almost 164 percent in 2016 as compared to 2017. Digitization can be engaging, but endangering as well. With defect detection and reduced failure rates, DevOps approach enables enterprises to build robust applications that with recovering capabilities even during a breakdown or during incidents such as data breach.

Organizational Revamp

We already discussed, DevOps is not just about using tools, but it also about changing an organization’s strategy and opening up the communication channels for supporting continuous delivery. The strategy can work with changes at an organizational level. This is imperative, as there is no definite way of development and testing in a Digital Transformation scenario. Continuous communication and collaboration can help accelerate innovation and growth.

It further enhances the ability to research and innovate, and build a more Performance Oriented culture. There is no scope for working in silos in a DevOps world, which is imperative for Digital Transformation.

Efficiency and Job Satisfaction

DevOps emphasizes on automation and smaller development cycles that help frequent releases that can result is more and more efficiency. Moreover, from an organizational perspective, it is important for enterprises to keep their teams motivated. In a DevOps scenario developers spend more time developing and far less time is wasted on waiting for machines to get configured. With automation there are fewer manual processes for IT operations. This brings down the costs and also the errors.

In Conclusion

A study for Forrester effectively validates why DevOps is still relevant and organizations need to stay upbeat about this approach.

Forrester’s study yielded three key findings: DevOps practices enable organizations to increase satisfaction, revenue, and efficiency. Nearly seven out of 10 organizations delivering applications monthly or more frequently expect higher customer satisfaction. On top of that, 65% of those releasing rapidly anticipate improvements in efficiency across teams, and 56% anticipate revenue growth. Faster delivery cycles enable organizations to provide innovative solutions by quickly delivering new capabilities and reducing the time they spend waiting for feedback. They are able to try new ideas quickly, improve the ones that work, and rapidly improve or remove the ones that don’t. Better, faster feedback enables organizations to cut waste, reduce cost, and improve customer experiences.

Connect with DevOps experts at Cigniti to standardize efforts and ensure accelerated time to market with DevOps Testing.