10 DevOps Benefits for Business: How DevOps Improves Businesses?

But what exactly is DevOps?

In simpler terms, DevOps is a blend of “development” and “operations.” The “Dev” part includes developers, QA teams, product teams, and others involved in software development, while the “Ops” part covers system engineers, administrators, release engineers, security personnel, and more.

Traditionally, development and operations teams operate separately, often leading to misunderstandings and blame games when issues arise. DevOps changes this by encouraging collaboration between these teams throughout the product’s lifecycle.

According to studies comparing adoption and success rates those who adopt DevOps practices rate it among the most important parts of their businesses. This is surprising as the benefits of DevOps are not always apparent from the start.

In this article, we will explore the tangible business benefits of DevOps, investigating ten ways it can improve your organization’s efficiency and overall performance.

How is DevOps used in business?

Before we delve into the benefits of DevOps for business growth, let’s explore examples of using DevOps in business.

DevOps benefits the business process through various practices:

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD):

Instead of manually putting together software updates, CI/CD sets up automated pipelines that do it for developers. This speeds up the delivery of new software and makes sure each release is consistent and dependable.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC):

Imagine automating the setup and management of the company’s digital resources. IaC does this by using special tools, like Terraform or Ansible, which makes it easier to control and reduces the chance of errors. Plus, it can grow with the business.

Monitoring and Alerting:

Think of it like having a real-time watchdog for your digital systems. With monitoring and alerting, businesses get instant notifications when something goes wrong, helping them fix issues quickly. This means less downtime and more reliability.

Security Integration:

In today’s digital world, security is vital. DevSecOps brings security into every step of creating software, making sure that vulnerabilities are found and fixed early on. This keeps all applications safer and lowers the risk of data breaches.

Cloud Adoption and Optimization:

DevOps practices are often used to migrate applications to the cloud, enabling businesses to take advantage of scalability, cost savings, and flexibility offered by cloud providers like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.

10 DevOps Benefits for Business

1. Improved Operational Support and Faster Fixes

By leveraging the power of automation through your Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline, your team can efficiently deploy and test code across various environments. The collaborative approach, where multiple teams communicate effectively and maintain consistency in configuration management and scripting practices, is a fundamental part of the DevOps methodology. This standardization not only prevents roadblocks but also saves your team valuable time.

The benefits of DevOps automation for business become evident as it eliminates the need for your team to constantly test new code by hand. This allows you to push your packages and releases to production faster and with fewer errors.

2. Better Processes across IT, Automation, Teamwork, and Culture

In an ideal world, we’d never have to do any tedious task twice. Instead, we’d automate. This is one of the core benefits of DevOps for businesses. When development and operations teams are aligned, and you mix in strong processes, it provides the right foundation for automation.

With strong DevOps practices, teams are often just one click away from another test or iteration. This allows them to deploy up to 46 times more frequently than competitors who don’t use DevOps. For example, you may want two systems to work the same way for different clients or regions and keep the data separate. With DevOps, you’re still one click away from a solution.

3. Deeper Engagement and More Collaboration within Your Team

Before formally implementing DevOps, Coherent Solutions had been working in a DevOps culture for years. How? The prevailing idea was that every person on the team was responsible for delivering a good product. Regardless of their job title, everyone was involved in high-level activities — in addition to their own specific responsibilities. Working this way makes people care much more about the quality of their work. It also means that traditionally opposed departments are more inclined to work together. This kind of organic collaboration is one of the key DevOps benefits for companies and can be formalized but thrives best when it propagates naturally.

4. More Buy-In from Management

More than just a new buzzword or management philosophy, DevOps brings real results in speed, transparency, change management, and quality. For example, if you have a clear idea for an app, DevOps can reduce production time and bring it to life faster. Less time equals less money spent, meaning better results for senior leaders and a faster path to positive business outcomes.

As senior leaders recognize these DevOps advantages for business, developers and product owners are more likely to gain buy-in from leadership. DevOps is, in general, a way of bringing disparate parts of the business closer together, which makes the senior manager’s job much easier.

5. Improved Client Experience

If you optimize processes appropriately, it may only take from a few seconds to a few minutes to bring a code update into the production environment. In contrast, we had a client who didn’t employ DevOps. This client had scripts deploying all new updates to their databases. This process didn’t allow them to roll back or find mistakes in processes. Naming conventions were poor, and we didn’t have a complete picture of the update that was deployed, the server, or the environment. To find the right information, we had to use an Excel document. The workflow was clunky and killed productivity at scale.

DevOps is a service for the client, removing inefficiencies like the one in the example above. DevOps practices also improve the quality of work and the pride your team feels in that work by instilling best practices, such as A/B testing and continuous feedback.

6. Boosted to Innovation and Focus

Developers joke that “if we deploy faster, it will just give developers more time to find innovations.” While teams joke about this, there’s an element of truth to it. By speeding up deployment, you open the door to innovation. Working in a sandbox environment lets you play around with new technology and innovative ideas, which is one of the advantages of DevOps for business. Efficient DevOps management gives you the time you need during the product journey to find out just how good a new idea is.

7. More Stable Operating Environments

Another benefit is the increased stability in production environments. It doesn’t matter which scripting language you’re using: Python, Terraform, PowerShell, Bash, or CloudFormation — the automation and certainty of DevOps procedures provide stability across a range of languages and environments.

Coherent Solutions achieves stability through repetition and by avoiding unnecessary changes. For example, developers in dev environments with administrative permissions can make changes, but then later forget about them. This hurts your change history reporting and makes it harder to track down changes.

However, with DevOps, all processes are automated, and teams can be sure that their updates are stable.

8. Faster Correction, Fewer Defects

After developers find a way to correct a defect, the correction needs to be released. If you follow a bad process, the correction may take minutes, but the release could take days or months. Among other practices, DevOps enforces very rich logging, monitoring, and alerting processes. This means that whenever something goes wrong, you’re notified ASAP. You also receive more accurate information that helps your team troubleshoot. And as any DevOps engineer knows, when it comes to defects, you spend 99% of your time investigating and 1% actually fixing the problem. DevOps frees up your time by finding problems faster — sometimes even instantly.

9. Continuous Testing and Monitoring

Bottlenecks are created when you have to investigate and spend time looking for system errors and inefficiencies. Developing ongoing processes for testing automation and monitoring prevents these potential roadblocks.

10. Boosted Teamwork

DevOps is the business of self-improvement, which leads to team improvement. With DevOps at the wheel, teams are united, and Quality Assurance (QA) and development can work together without conflict, contributing to the overall benefits for the organization from DevOps.

Typically, developers see QA as the team that breaks everything, and QA see developers as the team that never fixes anything. Instead, DevOps brings both teams into alignment, working towards the best outcome.

3 Examples When DevOps Increased the Company Success

Amazon

In Amazon’s early server-centric era, predicting equipment needs was a persistent headache. This often led to a staggering 40% of server capacity going unused. During the peak holiday shopping season, this number could skyrocket to over 75%, resulting in substantial waste and financial expenditure.

Transitioning to Amazon Web Services (AWS) allowed the company to scale capacity up or down incrementally, reducing unnecessary spending on server capacity. More importantly, it ushered in a new era of continuous deployment. Developers could now deploy their code to the required servers at their convenience. Within a year, Amazon achieved code deployments every 11.7 seconds, reducing outages and increasing revenue.

AWS continues to support their DevOps journey, including innovations like DevOps Guru, harnessing machine learning for proactive issue detection.

Netflix

Netflix underwent a remarkable transformation, shifting from a DVD rental service to a streaming powerhouse. However, managing their extensive cloud infrastructure presented a challenge as suitable commercial tools were lacking. To address this, they embraced open-source solutions and adopted DevOps practices.

This journey led to the creation of the Simian Army, a collection of automated tools that played a vital role in identifying and resolving bugs and errors proactively. These efforts were aimed at ensuring a seamless experience for subscribers. Later, Netflix also introduced Titus, a container management tool that not only resolved scaling issues but also enhanced their recommendations, streaming, and content systems.

Netflix’s commitment to innovation earned them the 2015 JAX Special Jury Award for their pioneering approach to DevOps in the entertainment industry.

Walmart

Walmart faced fierce competition from Amazon in the retail industry but used DevOps to become a leader. They established WalmartLabs in 2011, which created OneOps, an open-source DevOps platform for cloud and application lifecycle management. OneOps worked with various platforms and databases, offering automated orchestration, rapid environment deployment, and cost visibility, among other DevOps business benefits.

In addition, WalmartLabs contributed to the open-source landscape by creating tools like Hapi, a Node.js framework for building applications and services that allows developers to focus on crafting reusable application logic instead of spending time building infrastructure.

As a result, WalmartLabs not only helped Walmart thrive as a retailer but also deployed over 100,000 OpenStack cores for their private cloud, continuing to evolve their agile approach.

Conclusion

In today’s fast-paced business world, DevOps stands as a powerful ally for success. From optimizing operations and boosting collaboration to delivering top-notch software quickly, DevOps offers a multitude of benefits.

However, DevOps isn’t just about tools; it’s a mindset of continuous improvement and teamwork. So, whether you’re a startup or an established enterprise, consider DevOps as your strategic partner on the journey to digital prosperity. Start your DevOps journey now, and the rewards will follow.

Embrace DevOps Benefits for Business with Coherent Solutions.

At Coherent Solutions, we’re committed to helping your organization unlock the full potential of DevOps services. Our comprehensive approach goes beyond mere implementation; it’s about fostering a DevOps culture that becomes seamlessly integrated into your business’s core principles.

If you are looking to create a solid DevOps business case that speeds up software delivery and paves the path for business innovation, do not hesitate to reach out to our team to learn more.

It’s essential to evaluate your organization’s goals, constraints, and specific needs before deciding whether DevOps is suitable for your context. If you have any questions or uncertainties, please feel free to reach out to our team. We’re here to help you understand how DevOps improves business and make the right decision about whether DevOps is the perfect fit for your company’s needs.