Why we are moving to DevOps?

Organizations across the world are leveraging DevOps principles to improve business performance and profitability. In the bygone era, pun intended, IT departments worked in silos with development team creating large chunks of code and throwing it over the wall to the tester areas. It required time, effort and bureaucratic wrangles to push the code to the production. Further down the line, it got tricky with unforeseen errors often forcing the Operations to go back to the starting line to fix these errors.

But with DevOps, the key teams across the IT shop floor work together, collaborate and share their responsibilities to achieve their goal i.e. happy customers. This can be achieved by automating workflows, continuous learning, collaboration and disintermediation with a singular focus on moving ahead the disruption curve.

A recent Harvard study found that more than 40% of businesses will not survive by 2030. A large majority will reorganize themselves to meet the dynamic markets and customers. With technological advances disrupting the market faster than before, it is inevitable that companies deliver products and services that are timely and relevant. In IT, it means pushing these new features and deployments as and when the market demands without disrupting existing operations.

The overwhelming consensus among adaptors and experts is that DevOps has been a performance enhancer that accelerated deployment rates of software. Amazon, the pioneer, has new deployments every 11.6 hours, whereas Etsy, one of the early adopters does 50 deployments a day without disrupting their operations. Google, Netflix, Facebook and many others are pushing hundreds of codes per day without jeopardizing stability and security of their systems.

The heightened performance of DevOps is through continuous software delivery where small chunks of software are developed and tested in identical environments. Automation plays a key role in driving this iterative process where software and infrastructure are built side by side and scaled up to meet market requirements. This drastically brings down time to market and provides a production environment where customer needs are met immediately.

The biggest takeaway from DevOps is the continuous delivery of software with better bug fixing and problem resolution capabilities. Gone are the days when infrastructure and software are divergently developed on an adhoc basis. Developers, testers and all denizens of the production floor cohabit the same space simultaneously creating, testing and monitoring small chunks of software that are seamlessly scaled to meet market needs.

It is also making learning fun. Cross-functional expertise is an inevitable outcome of collaboration enriching organizational expertise. There is a cultural shift within the organization with continual learning and breaking of silos. Decision making becomes sharper as back end developers are more in touch with the customers and market. Ultimately, the organization becomes a living and breathing information source where multiple CoEs work together to bring out market churners for their customers.

DevOps is a more of a culture and philosophy that delivers measurable and non-measurable results. On one hand, the impact of DevOps can be discerned through performance ratings, quality numbers and financial parameters, but it is the abstract that sustains the business. Increased employee engagement, organizational cohesion, continual learning, data driven decision making and excellence marking are something that we cannot put a value to. That’s what organizations are looking for while going the
DevOps route.