What Is The Greatest Value of DevOps?

To gather insights on the state of DevOps, we spoke with 22 executives at 19 companies implementing DevOps for themselves and helping clients to implement a DevOps methodology. We asked, "What problems are solved by DevOps – where is the greatest value seen?" Here's what they told us:

Speed To Market

• Shipping more quickly. A shorter, more positive feedback loop. The ability to pick up new tools and technology more quickly. High profile mistakes are showing how pervasive software is in our life. 
• Accelerate the process of core software transformation. Change from web front end. Now it’s core systems and core apps. 
• Improved the quality of the software. Agility and speed of delivery. Increased speed to market by 42% and improved quality 48%. Improved employee retention, efficiency, and productivity.
• Speed and efficiency of getting changes into the customers’ hands. A shorter feedback loop with a higher quality of product and service. Able to fix bugs quickly so there’s little to no downtime. 
• Speed to market.
• Reduction in time to value. Because you have a pipeline and automation you can shorten the time to value, ship smaller components, and see how they behave. Rollbacks are simpler and a task that can be automated.
• The stories I hear are consistent with regards to culture change, internal teams, centers of excellence, delivering more quickly, speed, and agility. There’s a shortage of talent. If you want to keep good developers and administrators you have to use the latest technology and processes or people will not stay. 
• DevOps emerged as a response to many different needs – for some organizations, it was supporting agile development, for others, it was a need for shorter development times, faster fixes, or more efficient operations support. Our DevOps journey began on day one of our operations when most of the key messages of the DevOps movement were already understood and gaining traction. Because of this, DevOps is just a part of how we work; almost all of the problems solved by DevOps are problems that we have faced. Running our business without DevOps is almost unimaginable.
• Release smaller bits of code faster. Lather, rinse and repeat while constantly iterating and improving. 
• The greatest value DevOps brings is the automation of manual processes and tasks allowing for continuous deployments which result in quicker implementation of new features into our product. Additionally, teams are faced with the challenge of releasing quality applications at an increased speed, and DevOps breaks down the organizational and process barriers that often hinder this.
• Speed to market with error-free applications with short feedback loops.

Mean-Time-To-Resolution

• 1) The value of breaking down the silos in the culture – getting developers and operations attacking problems as a team. 2) Drastically reducing MTTR and responsiveness to customer-found bugs. 3) True standardization without losing agility. Tools focus on standardization of framework processes without regards to the technology. 4) Consistent framework and testing platform for secure development and testing environment. This increases the ability to fix insecure code before it goes into production while allowing developers to build and deploy in containers.

Feedback

• The velocity with which you can make changes influences how quickly you can resolve changes in the field.
• Help build a better bridge between operations and engineering. With DevOps, they start to speak the same language with tool driven processes like Bamboo. Shorter cycles. Break down walls. Able to address issues faster. 
• Ability to actually enable continuous delivery with reliability and speed, with limited manpower since the tools provide checks and monitoring. Ability to correct problems in real-time before they occur.

Developers' Time

• Take overhead and calendar time in the development process and remove it via automation. This accelerates development and reduces the opportunity for errors.

Other

• 1) DevOps can tell where sensitive data is going by analyzing the source code. 2) DevOps can protect the app from OWASP risks. 3) Protect customer data. 4) Prevent situations like Equifax – know where vulnerabilities are and apply patches.
• Adoption of best practices internally and externally enables customers to improve across the board.
• Marry infrastructure with development. The line is getting blurrier with DevOps and SRE (site reliability engineering).

Here’s who we talked to:

• Gil Sever, CEO, Applitools
• Mike Tria, Head of Infrastructure, Atlassian
• John Trembley, CMO and Scott Harvey, V.P. Engineering, Atmosera
• Aruna Ravichandran, VP DevOps Products and Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies
• Flint Brenton, CEO, Collabnet
• Tom Hearn, Data Center Architect, Datalink
• Shehan Akmeemana, CTO, Data Dynamics
• Robert Reeves, Co-founder and CTO, Datical
• Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud
• Job van der Voort, Vice President of Product, GitLab
• Ben Slater, Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr
• Ilya Pupko, Chief Architect, Jitterbit
• Tom Joyce, CEO, Pensa
• Stephanos Bacon, Chief of Product, Portfolio Strategy for Application Platforms, Red Hat
• Michael Mazyar, CTO, Samanage
• Eric Wahl, IT Director and John Joseph, Vice President of Marketing, Scribe Software
• Manish Gupta, CEO and Founder, ShiftLeft
• Martin Loewinger, Director of SaaS Operations and Jonathan Parrilla, DevOps Engineer, SmartBear
• Chris McFadden, V.P. Engineering and Operations, SparkPost