There is a lot of discussion going on as to whether organizations should value the DevOps culture or whether there is simply no need for them to implement it. The reasoning behind the creation of the DevOps role and therefore the culture is to break down the wall between IT operations and developers.
DevOps is an organizational culture for application development and maintenance success. It is not a technology or process. DevOps is a combination of people, process, tools, vendors, and partners. DevOps encourages transparency and candid communication between software developers and IT operations and administration to increase the agility with which applications are delivered. By automating, monitoring, and measuring the release of code through develop, test and deploy the process becomes more sustainable, scalable and reliable. It is all the “–ity words”, agility, reliability, scalability, sustainability, reproducibility. Optimally all manual tasks are eliminated, reducing the potential for human error and making roll forward and roll back less error prone.
The goal of DevOps is a reduction of defects. DevOps goes hand-in-hand with Agile software development methodologies. This places emphasis on rapid identification of defects. Optimally this identification and resolution is close to the time of introduction. Configuration SLA minimized. Any developer or server environment should be able to be reloaded in a short amount of time, e.g. 4 hours from the request. Effective DevOps implementations incur less daily stress and remove the constant fire drills many organizations both large and small experience. This makes for a lot of happy people!
The main benefit of having a DevOps culture is the faster and more effective delivery of software to your customers. In addition to this, there are even more benefits! DevOps drives business outcomes. Business teams are highly motivated by time to market (agility). Less churn means the right frequency for releases and less wasted time. Business teams see components early in development to reduce rework. DevOps allows for an efficiency in Digital Data Supply Chain (DDSC). Organizations with optimized DDSC can recognize opportunity, utilize prescriptive analytics, and build for competitive advantage. In most organizations this means a blend of packaged and open-source software to allow for flexibility where appropriate and supportability for commodity operations. Digital Data Supply Chain comprises Enterprise integration, Advanced Analytics, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Digital Commerce, Digital Marketing, and Master Data Management.
In essence, DevOps is a business-driven software solutions delivery process. The DevOps practice is instrumental in reliably materializing a business idea in a software product, ultimately delivering value to customers. DevOps processes improve product time-to-market metric (faster time to value) and enable organizations to react to new market demands more quickly. With DevOps, customer feedback on product is captured and quickly incorporated in the next iteration of the product delivered in a continues manner. The ultimate result of a fast accommodation of the customer feedback is an enhanced customer experience, customer loyalty, and larger market share.
DevOps has come a long way in just a few short years. There might still be some companies out there trying to figure out why they need DevOps, but those companies won’t be around for long. They’ll either figure it out and jump on the DevOps bandwagon or they will no longer exist to worry about it.
Are you ready improve your customer’s experience by delivering applications quicker and more effectively? See our DevOps training and courseware page for more information!