Digital transformation is changing how businesses operate, adapt to customer demands, and deliver value. It requires organizations to challenge the status quo and learn from failure constantly. DevOps helps teams develop and release software faster, resulting in better quality and a higher level of service for customers. It’s much more than simply using new tools, however.
DevOps is a Culture Change
Performance suffers when businesses implement DevOps without nurturing the cultural shift that supports it. According to Gartner, developers and IT operations teams must work together in a DevOps-based culture to ensure automation efforts succeed 90 percent of the time.
One reason for failure is the siloing of information and expertise between teams. DevOps eliminates these silos by creating a combined process focusing on visibility-powered collaboration. It encourages transparency and communication between development, testing, operations, and other teams.
With this collaboration, companies can accelerate development and reduce IT costs. For example, companies that deploy a mature DevOps pipeline can reduce software defects by up to 70 percent and get code to production three times faster. Moreover, they can deliver customer updates two to four times faster than their competitors. These are significant benefits that translate to sustainable competitive advantage. These are only possible if team members understand the value of DevOps and are ready to invest in change.
It’s a Way of Working
While a DevOps Boston approach starts with team structure and processes, it can’t be successful without effective tools. These should support rapid deployment and allow teams to scale quickly while keeping engineers in control of high-velocity releases.
For example, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices automate integrating code changes, testing them, and triggering builds to deploy new applications. However, these tools can create additional work if teams don’t manage them properly.
To benefit most from these tools, teams need to adopt a DevOps mindset and work in tandem with them. This means establishing workflows, monitoring, alerting, and CI/CD infrastructure for all application environments. Then, they can focus on best practices and skills development to continually improve their DevOps processes. This translates into faster time from idea to live software and a competitive advantage for the business. This is what drives DevOps adoption. It’s not just another tool in the toolbox but a way of working that can transform the entire industry.
It’s a Technology Change
DevOps requires powerful tools to automate manual processes, help teams work together more effectively, and manage infrastructure at scale. Solutions may include an integrated development environment (IDE) for developers, continuous integration/delivery frameworks to test and deploy code changes quickly; logging tools to monitor system performance; microservices architectures to enable scalability; and collaboration tools like Slack to facilitate communication among engineers.
DevOps practices also reduce time to market and increase agility. Organizations that implement best-in-class DevOps practices reduce software defects by up to 70%, release updates 100-200 times more frequently, and get products to market two to four times faster. This is achieved through automation, improved collaboration, and hyperfocus on user needs through short feedback loops.
It’s a Business Change
Companies are deploying changes to production at an increasingly rapid pace. Changes can result from business initiatives or technical issues, and many are required to support critical processes such as payments or customer services. DevOps practices can increase deployment speed, decrease downtime, and deliver quality software.
Enterprises need to be able to deploy changes consistently and reliably. They require greater scale and visibility across their IT operations to avoid outages. According to the IT Process Institute Visible Ops Handbook, human errors cause 80% of unplanned outages impacting production systems. DevOps practices deliver consistency to the SDLC and lower the likelihood of deployment error.
The key to successful DevOps is not tools but people and culture. Organizations should adopt best practices such as building strong communication and collaboration between teams, fostering a DevOps culture, addressing technical debt, and building executive support. This will accelerate their ability to deliver quality software and faster, more reliable customer service.
