Why Is DevOps Becoming Mainstream in Software-Powered Organizations?

Early DevOps practitioners have shown DevOps to be more than just a cultural aspect or a set of tools – they have confirmed it to be a crucial success factor and a competency well worth developing in today’s environment of rapid evolution, technological advancement, and huge customer or employee expectations. The demand for DevOps in organizations is high and need of the hour, but it is not something that can be adopted on to the average team just like that. When this happens, the current organizational undercurrents will weaken the effectiveness of such a program. Rather, the development, operations, and overarching management processes must be redesigned anew and from the scratch. DevOps can be profoundly disruptive to a business, it has an enduring and strong impact on organizational success. After all, IT is the core of almost any business and the effectiveness and agility gained there will have a notable impact on the readiness and coordination of the organization as a whole.

The term DevOps has entered into our general language and has gathered much attention and focus these days.

The DevOps Evolution

DevOps, as we know it today, was born out of a long history of software development methodologies and principles. For decades, programmers have tried to improve the software development method, and those works have produced the waterfall, lean, agile, continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous improvement models.

Let's begin with the waterfall model. Here, developers considered that if they can just plan out correctly and follow a definite set of iterative levels, the software development process would flow perfectly. However, consumer changes, team dynamics, and a host of other issues proved that the waterfall model included high risk and uncertainty. Changes resulted in a huge amount of rework, and all these chaos created a huge loss and many people thought to move out of this process.

Agile is incremental while Lean integrates methods to deliver product and features more promptly. In an effort to develop fast, Continuous Integration (CI) stretches this method by demanding code check-in and builds at various points throughout the day, this made more sense. Each build runs through a level of quality checking to identify errors soon after they are injected into the code. Continuous Delivery (CD) uses pre-production environments in a programmed fashion to perform software releases at periodic interims. CI assures those individual elements are blended properly and that modifications at different areas work well collectively. Lastly, continuous operations consolidate the builds into the operational environment in such a way that there is no lapse in the availability of the operational systems due to new releases.

How Is DevOps Becoming Mainstream?

DevOps Promotes Collaboration and Mutual Learning

Software development and IT operations teams become one in DevOps and so every person in those teams works in unity towards one singular goal. Team members share the alike tools, technology, workspaces, and methodologies, principles which all enhance collaboration.

DevOps Regulates Processes and Methods

DevOps unites previously disparate groups through a standard set of processes and methods. This permits for more consistency in results and makes it simpler to plan, measure, and assess the achievement of teams. Along with these measures comes a shared culture and knowledge, which makes it comfortable for the team to work synchronically.

DevOps Reduces Coding Glitches and Improves Error Resolution Speed

DevOps, when linked with CI and CD, couples specific changes to testing, validation, and evaluation of the code so that mistakes are known and resolved soon consequently. Developers do not require to hunt through thousands of lines of code to detect the error because they know it was injected in the latest build.

DevOps Is More Closely Engaged With the Customer

Releases are more timely and produced more regularly so that customers can see the product taking shape and give their feedback. The end outcome is a product that more efficiently meets the needs of the customer.

DevOps Drives a Sea of Change With Consistent Iterations

Change often disruptive, but when executed correctly, it is well appreciated and greeted. One of the biggest elements of reducing change disruption is in setting expectations. DevOps makes changes in iterations that are designed, consistent, and organized so that the DevOps team, stakeholders, and customers know what to expect.

The benefits of DevOps are many, recently a telecommunications giant managed to speed up their infrastructure management by 90%. They automated all infrastructure management related activities, including integrating with the ticket approval process, with no manual steps. As a result, their overall DevOps efficiency increased significantly.

Happy DevOpsing!