How does DevOps benefit your organization. Use this as a reference to help you persuade your colleagues or to reinforce your understanding of why you chose to go the DevOps route when the road gets bumpy.
The tech landscape is an ever-changing environment. Some languages evolve and new ones are created. Frameworks come and go. Infrastructure tooling changes to meet the ever-growing demands for hosting applications more efficiently and delivering services more quickly. Tools continue to abstract low-level computing to reduce engineering overhead.
The cloud isn’t the future; it’s now. Although you may still be transitioning or not yet ready to move, realize that the cloud is the way forward for all but a few companies. It gives you more flexibility than traditional infrastructure, lowers the stress of operations, and (usually) costs significantly less because of a pay-as-you-go pricing structure.
Because of increased demand, great engineers are scarce. There simply aren’t enough engineers to fill all the jobs currently open or to meet market demand over the next decade and beyond. If you implement DevOps in your overall engineering culture, you can level up engineers and train them in the methodology and technology that supports continuous improvement.
The yearly “State of DevOps Report” released by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) makes it clear: Companies across the world are using DevOps to adjust their engineering practices and are reaping the benefits. They see increases in engineering production and reductions in cost. With DevOps, these companies are shifting from clunky processes and systems to a streamlined way of developing software focused on the end user.
Humans have reached a point in our evolution at which technology is evolving faster than our brains. Thus the greatest challenges humans face are due to human limitations — not the limitations of our software or infrastructure. Unlike other software development methodologies, DevOps focuses holistically on your sociotechnical system.
DevOps accelerates the growth of individual engineers as well as that of the engineering team as a whole. Engineers are smart people. They’re also naturally curious. A great engineer who embraces a growth mindset needs new challenges after mastering a particular technology, tool, or methodology or they often feel stagnant.
One of challenges of modern technology companies is this gap between the needs of the business and the needs of engineering. In a traditional company, with traditional management strategies, a natural friction exists between engineering and departments like marketing, sales, and business development. DevOps seeks to unify each department of a business and create a shared understanding and respect.
Failure is inevitable. It’s simply unavoidable. Predicting every way in which your system can fail is impossible because of all the unknowns. (And it can fail spectacularly, can’t it?) Instead of avoiding failure at all costs and feeling crushed when failure does occur, you can prepare for it. DevOps prepares organizations to respond to failure, but not in a panicky, stress-induced way.
The cycle of continuous improvement should always center around the customer. You must continuously think about the end user and integrate feedback into your software delivery life cycle.
Acceleration and increased efficacy are at the core of the DevOps methodology. By automating labor-intensive manual processes, DevOps frees engineers to work on projects that make the software and systems more reliable and easily maintained — without the chaos of unexpected service interruptions.
The software delivery life cycle has evolved from the slow and linear Waterfall process to an agile and continuous loop of DevOps. You no longer think up a product, develop it fully, and then release it to customers, hoping for its success. Instead, you create a feedback loop around the customer and continuously deliver iterative changes to your products. This connected circuit enables you to continuously improve your features and ensure that the customer is satisfied with what you’re delivering.