DevOps is now a part of how the development industry does business. If you have not implemented it yourself within your organization, you have almost certainly heard about it from a thought leader or connection in the industry who cannot stop singing its praises.
Of course, the tech industry is a faddish one, which should naturally cause you to be skeptical of any trend that promises to cure all of your software development ills. However, to a great extent, the reason that organizations both large and small are moving to DevOps is that it addresses exactly those pain points that have been giving them trouble in the past.
So what exactly is the business case for DevOps — and how are companies using it to fulfill their objectives?
The Business Case for DevOps
Today’s competitive business landscape has caused many organizations to rethink how they release their products. Instead of issuing big sets of features all at once, companies are trying to transport small features to their customers through a series of consecutive release trains.
This model has many advantages, including quick feedback from clients and better-quality software, which in turn leads to high customer satisfaction. To make it a reality, however, companies must work on improving several metrics:
- Increased deployment frequency
- Lower failure rate of new releases
- Shortened lead time between fixes
- Faster mean time to recovery in the event of new version crashing
Organizations are increasingly finding that DevOps helps them with all of these objectives and more.
How Does DevOps Help?
Proponents of DevOps typically cite how it can make improvements regarding two major factors: development speed and flexibility. Today’s software landscape is characterized by increased market competition and consumers with changing tastes who expect the best product in the shortest amount of time. Those businesses who are prepared to release software faster, and to adapt to evolving conditions, are those that stand to gain the most.
One of the most valuable sources of information about DevOps is the State of DevOps report published annually by Puppet. The study found that high-performing DevOps teams deploy code 46 times more frequently, are five times less likely to fail when making changes, and recover from downtime 96 times faster than low-performing teams. Another study by research agency Coleman Parkes found that advanced DevOps users were able to improve their speed to market by 42 percent over non-DevOps users.
How Are Companies Using DevOps?
From tiny startups to massive Fortune 500 firms, organizations are using DevOps to achieve levels of performance that were unthinkable even five years ago. Here are just a few examples of companies you may recognize:
- Etsy: Software developers went from making deployments twice a week — each requiring more than four hours — to more than 60 times per day.
- Google: The company’s “Site Reliability Engineering” initiative — DevOps by another name — has been able to maintain the uptime of services like Gmail and Google Docs at 99.97 percent.
- Amazon: By moving to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, developers could deploy to the servers of their choice at any time, resulting in an incredible average length of 11.7 seconds between code deployments.
DevOps has enabled countless companies to make tens, hundreds and even thousands of code deployments per day, all while delivering world-class stability, reliability, and security. Any business interested in gaining the same benefits would do well to investigate how it can bring the power of DevOps to its organization.
To learn more about the importance of DevOps and culture, check out the video of our recent webinar, below.
