Benefits Of Adopting Devops In Your Business

In this rapidly changing world, where new technologies are being released every day, it is not uncommon to hear of companies working on software or projects for so long that they are outdated by the time they come out. In this fast-paced environment, agility and flexibility are now essential business attributes.

This is where DevOps comes into play. DevOps is a company culture that encourages synchronization between software development and IT operations, allowing for more flexibility. If properly implemented, DevOps can transform your processes and could prove to be hugely beneficial to your business, your team and your customers.

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Here are 5 of the main benefits of adopting DevOps

1. Satisfied customers and improved UX

Delivering better software with an improved customer experience is the ultimate goal of DevOps. Through collaboration as well as continuous testing, integration, feedback and monitoring, the DevOps culture helps you get a better understanding of what your customers need, want, like and dislike. It also allows organizations to spot and address issues earlier in the development process.

The primary objective of usability metrics is to assist in producing a system or product that is neither under- nor over-engineered.

Today, the value of the product is measured in the experience delivered and not just the functionality. To provide a good experience, the entire UX strategy should be defined with a clear understanding of the end goal we want to achieve.

Faster bug fixes will go a long way towards satisfying and retaining increasingly demanding and impatient customers. “Due to fast feedback loops and high release velocity, service deficiencies are removed much faster than in the past, which leads to an improvement of perceived service quality and reliability”, explains Michael Schmidt at DevOps.com.

2. Breaking down silos

One of the main benefits of DevOps is the breaking down of IT silos. Different teams work differently, sometimes without a lot of visibility and proper communication. But adopting DevOps means you are bringing development and IT operations on the same page, focusing on a single goal and within a common timeline.

Further DevOps helps to expand agile practices beyond development and test to include client, business stakeholders, and operations to break down silos and improve outcomes. Creating a culture of continuous improvement leveraging measures of effectiveness and efficiency.

DevOps environment provides more visibility making it easier for the team members to understand the impact of new code and operational information on performance hence driving a greater sense of responsibility and accountability. As Intellyx President Jason Bloomberg explained to DEVOPSDigest.com, “the most important strategic advantage is proving that self-organizational approaches can successfully break down the silos that result from hierarchical organizational models.”

3. A quicker turnaround

Waterfall-based projects make it very difficult and expensive to make changes to what happened in the early stages of a project. This means that waterfall method are inherently slower than agile methods like DevOps. Thankfully, DevOps simplifies processes and reduces costs thanks to shorter, iterative processes. “The biggest value DevOps offers is velocity, ensuring faster delivery of features. Key aspects are automated deployments and continuous integration, ensuring that fewer mistakes are made and productivity is increased”, said Richard Whitehead of Moogsoft on DEVOPSDigest.com.

Planning ahead leads to less unplanned work or rushed changes. Less wasted work leads to better productivity, efficiency, and an increase of the flow and delivery speeds.

A quicker turnaround will provide your business with a crucial competitive edge: you will be able to quickly develop new features to adapt to customer behavior or needs.

4. Better company culture, better communication, happier employees

While driving technical and organizational change, DevOps paves way for a cultural change within your business. Developing and encouraging collaboration and agility will have a long-term effect on your company culture. Employees will be more proactive, more creative and more energized. Not only this, but the improved communication and visibility on the whole of the project will help them understand that their efforts matter, making them feel more valuable.

It seems correct as implementing DevOps requires improving communication from top to bottom and also from bottom to top.All the members in the organizational structure even at the bottom level of the structure should be motivated and have the willingness to adopt this culture.

Having better communication between all the concerned parties and using available tools to help automate the possible processes can ensure quick solution of issues which will benefit the organization as it will reduce the development time and development cost.

Happy employees develop brilliant products leading to higher number of satisfied customers, eventually leading to increased revenue and a great company.

This, of course, will make them happier and more productive. Indeed, a recent study conducted in Asia Pacific and Japan showed that adding DevOps practices to an agile working environment increased employee productivity by 27%. Last but not least, your positive company culture is likely to help attract and retain more talented workers as a consequence. According to the same study, 76% of businesses using agile and DevOps methods showed an advantage in employee recruitment and retention.

5. A more agile company, ready to face the challenges of tomorrow

Finally, the agility of DevOps means it’s suited for the future. Companies in all industries now have to digitally transform the way they run. They need to promote methods that allow for rapid delivery and continuous feedback if they want to address the constantly evolving needs of today’s customers. In an ever-evolving world, adaptability is key.

Constantly shared news and plans create trust and transparency in the organization.Sharing increases visibility into what it takes to produce your end product.

DevOps is only gaining traction, and, in today’s fast-paced environment, it will soon become a must for any IT organization. As Kong Yang, from SolarWinds, puts it: “Adoption may seem overwhelming at first but remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day — time spent now learning about this model and adjusting your business to better suit it, will result in significant benefits in the near future.”

Tools that can be used for DevOps

Tools help to automate the processes and get a detailed perspective of the problems that are being solved while implementing DevOps. There are many tools available, few of them are:

1. JMeter
2. BlazeMeter
3. New Relic APM
4. Jenkins

Each of the above tools has their own strength to help in the DevOps culture. We have successfully used JMeter, BlazeMeter and New Relic APM.

JMeter and BlazeMeter help us in load testing in many of our projects. These tools simulate multiple user logins and provide the detailed count of passed/failed requests and amount of time taken for each request.

Whereas New Relic APM helps us by providing the detailed report on application performance. We especially like the tool’s capability of finding the pages or database queries which are causing issues in the application and monitoring downtime of the application.

Challenge to implement DevOps

DevOps is a method/a work culture wherein all the members of the team play an active part to improve the performance and provide better quality output to clients. So, if any of the team members does not take ownership over their work, this can cause issues in the complete chain.