Top DevOps Benefits for Business Efficiency

We are observing a surge in DevOps popularity as more businesses switch their mindset to that of streamlining development and operations, as they wish to enjoy DevOps benefits that come with implementing continuous improvement, automation, innovation, etc. According to Atlassian, a 2020 DevOps Trends Survey showed that responders almost unanimously agreed that DevOps has positively contributed to their organization. With that in mind, it’s easy to see that such a surge in interest is driven by the many benefits of following a DevOps approach, so businesses have a natural inclination to give their Dev and Ops teams a makeover.

What is DevOps? What is DevOps culture?

DevOps can be defined as a workplace culture, prevalent in the software development industry, which is characterized by bringing together development and operations, having the teams work alongside and have a grasp of their entire process from inception to maintenance. Such an approach triggers many beneficial changes in the team’s way of working and approach to product development and delivery, as the focus can be shifted back to the customer and generating maximum value. DevOps dismantles silos and fights dated practices, which were or still are the norm in some industries (e.g., waterfall for healthcare or government projects).

With the adoption of new work culture and philosophy, your transformed DevOps team generates business benefits, such as decreased time to market, efficient business metrics monitoring, cost reduction via automation, increased stability of the product, and more.

Why DevOps is important and its main benefits

The benefits of DevOps can be recognized by what it “brings to the table” in terms of improving development practices and outcomes, as well as how it contributes to your immediate business success. Let’s go over these in more detail.

For the business

These are the benefits that will place you on top of the market competition, having a positive impact on your profitability and customer satisfaction.

• Faster time to market is made possible with DevOps working unanimously on product development and deployment, meaning that the actual time it takes to release the product or each new update is drastically reduced. Your teams work in shorter increments with the main objective to create real and immediate value for the client, as opposed to chasing some grandiose vision of a large-scale project. You are shifting the focus to maintaining a more holistic approach to work processes, where Dev and Ops are parts of a whole. Another positive of fast time to market is that you can keep up and overrun competition, and stay on top of innovations and market trends.
• Business metrics monitoring means that your DevOps team is always ready to jump in and fix issues in your system or application as they pop out. This is important to keep the app running and avoiding downtime which otherwise can be harmful as it disrupts the workflow, leads to bad user experience, possible loss of data or expected revenue for business.
• Cost reduction via automation is an integral part of DevOps as you strive to minimize wasteful practices in your workflow. Automation helps establish consistent processes, enables efficient monitoring, continuous improvement, and immediate disaster response.
• Increased product stability is one of the benefits of continuous delivery in DevOps. The uninterrupted cycle of “build-test-deploy” allows your teams to keep their hand on the ‘pulse’ of your product, catch and fix bugs, improve your product and deliver updates regularly.

For tech and innovation

When it comes to improvements on the tech side of things, it’s all about how fast you are able to move on once you get into the DevOps stream of mind.

• Faster software delivery is made possible by working in increments, aligning Dev and Ops parts of software development, deployment, and beyond. Your DevOps team is working toward the goal of delivering a usable product to the client as soon as possible.
• Faster bug fixing comes with the established CI/CD practice. With the aim of continuously providing value, when you deliver the results of your work to the client, it doesn’t mean that you pull to a full stop. DevOps continue improving and adding to the product, deploying new features and updates, thus creating even more value.
• Faster recovery is an essential part of what makes up DevOps. It is possible due to extensive backups and having your team always on the ready. With efficient data monitoring and established procedures for immediate disaster response, your DevOps team can quickly act upon any system inconsistencies.
• Faster features delivery is again the courtesy of CI/CD. Your DevOps team is focused on delivering value to your client fast and then adding to it. Any fixes or updates may be deployed as often as once a day or every few weeks, depending on your established process and how your DevOps team performs.

So, what makes DevOps your winning approach for software delivery?

Where do all these benefits come from exactly? This would be the accumulation of practices implemented within your team that stir them toward the main goal of delivering value, such as continuously integrated operations, CI/CD, consistent communication among different teams, automated management of the infrastructure. This and more helps assess the level of your DevOps maturity and determine how far you have come in your DevOps implementation journey.

DevOps case study for SpoedTestCorona

Symphony Solutions offers to set you up with an expert team to deliver automation of your software operations, deploy higher quality products fast, make it scalable and secure, all the while you can free up costs and time to focus on innovation, brainstorming new features, or exploring ways to disrupt the market. We embrace Agile ways of working, thrive on automation and maxing out your team efficiency.

When SpoedTestCorona partnered up with Symphony Solutions, they were looking for a way to quickly release an innovative healthcare product that would help provide valuable services to people and medical personnel in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. Symphony Solutions set them up with a DevOps team that got right to it. In just two business days, the team set up a development and production infrastructure, automate it, and within two weeks they were able to launch a cross-platform web application on the market. The extremely tight go-to-market deadline was dictated by the rapidly rising cases and the need to have a reliable and affordable solution for 15-minute testing with results delivered to the user in the app. The DevOps team launched the MVP within the set timeframe, and the website attracted its first clients in the first few days.

Following the success of the SpoedTestCorona project, the client went on to collaborate with the Dutch govenrment on delivering antigen tests for schools in the Netherlands. Symphony Solutions team delivered the B2G solution in record time.

Do you need a DevOps team on your case? Why it’s better to have an established DevOps team

If you are still asking whether or not a DevOps team is something that you need to run a successful business and create unique value for your clients, consider some of the following:

• DevOps is a continuous process of improvement. Dev and Ops work in a fine balance that is required to quickly release functional software or application and continue adding on to it with new features and updates. This requires having an established process and a team that works well together and can collaborate efficiently with other departments. Once you start moving, you can’t trip yourself over because your team is not properly aligned and still finding their footing in DevOps.
• DevOps needs to be an established practice. It’s a pretty straightforward model of communication and cooperation within the team, where everyone needs to be on board. It’s not the case of hiring a person not familiar with DevOps and presenting them with the fact that “that’s what we’re doing around here”. It requires a certain level of commitment and understanding of the DevOps culture.
• The cost of DevOps experts is rapidly growing. And if you’re reading this, then you can have a good guess why – the demand is high, and experts are few. With the current DevOps trends, an expert DevOps engineer is not easy to come by, making them a very valuable asset to the team. Because of this, trying to build your own DevOps team may not be a viable option. That’s why it may be much preferred to opt for DevOps aaS in terms of cost and availability.

In conclusion

If you are looking to optimize your software development life cycle and bring the spotlight back to the customer and creating value for them, you may want to consider DevOps automation. Once you are set with an experienced team, you will soon enough see the benefits of following a DevOps approach. Keep your customers happy by delivering a high-quality product that gets updated and improved upon regularly. Get out of the loop of silos and insufficient team communication, instead opting for streamlined processes and highly efficient collaboration between teams.

Are you considering getting started on your DevOps journey? Symphony Solutions provides DevOps services to set you up with an efficient and experienced team of DevOps engineers who are working within established processes and will carry your business to the top of competition, help you keep up with industry trends and demands, and foster innovation.