DevOps is “Something for Everyone” phenomenon that benefits Organizations, Employees, and Consumers. Organizations benefit higher return on investment with lesser wastage. Employees benefit higher job satisfaction with lower stress. And Customers benefit higher quality at cheaper prices.
But the question is how DevOps which is a fairly a new practice can bring so many benefits?
To explain how DevOps benefits all let me tell about “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894”. During the 1880s, the Industrial Revolution had people flocking to the cities like London and New York. More people meant more horses and thus more manure in these cities. Excessive Manure on roads caused inconvenience to walkers, and lead to diseases. It was expected that in a couple of years there would be 9 feet of Manure in these cities. Yet, what no one saw coming was a new technology (The Car) that would completely obliterate those concerns. Overnight the Manure problem disappeared.
Likewise, DevOps simply eliminates the IT operations concerns of change management. DevOps tackles the software release problem using Technical tools, Architectural practices, and Cultural codes. Those tools and practices are manifested from the years of learning from Agile Methodology, Lean Manufacturing, and Progressive Thinking.
Organizational benefits of DevOps:
DevOps increases quality by producing work in small batches, fixing problems at source. Developer check-ins go through a pipeline of automated checks for tests, security, and code quality. These inspections happen immediately after a code is checked-in and not 3 months later when the developer has moved onto a different task. Therefore, problems are detected early.
Software teams rely on automated tests for regression and churn out new features without fear of failures. These tests act as guardrails for developers and signal if any existing functionality brakes. Automation is the key to improve stability.
An organization grows competitive when they churn out features fast. Combined with the ability to out experiment the competition, companies set themselves up for victory.
In the conventional form, we get busy with firefighting and never have a chance to innovate. However, DevOps brings tools and process that promote Innovation. It’s a bottom-up approach where systematic experimentation is supported by data to tests out assumptions.
Extended competitiveness and lower wastage lead to boost profit margins for organizations. The ROI happens fast. Organization starts witnessing gains in Productivity, Competitiveness, and Innovation.
Employee benefits of DevOps:
In conventional settings, software teams choose to bundle and deploy their features every few months. Software deliveries are scheduled for off-peak hours to alleviate risk. Developers, Testers, Managers and IT operations work late nights or weekends to deploy the changes. Here the verification is complicated because these organizations are reliant on old-fashioned processes. And the whole method takes 4 to 5 hours most times.
But, DevOps enables software teams to do Push button deployments anytime. With the aid of CI/CD and automation, developers can push code to production through the work hours with least impact on customers. Saving employees precious family time. Configuration Management and Infrastructure as a code procedures make it easy to consistently set up and destroy infrastructure.
Following deployment, features are verified by developers by wrapping them behind feature toggles. Product manager releases the feature to customers by switching ON a feature toggle. Also if something goes wrong in production, switching OFF a toggle feature is easy. Without the intervention of a developer. These techniques make the stakeholders (employees) life better.
DevOps places the Developers in the front seat and lets them own products and take enjoyment in it. Developers start treating the work as their own babies and let them take care of it entirely.
In the old means, it’s more of a top-down model, where managers are criticized if something goes wrong. But, in DevOps, there is no blaming. Since reverting from failures is fast, failures are treated as learning opportunities. That is the value of the DevOps that it changes the culture and result of the whole organization.
In fact, companies like Netflix intentionally inject failures into their systems to examine reliability. Proactively operating towards such purposes help avoid and recover from failures fast. Leading to tiniest disruption and maximum satisfaction.
Customer benefits of DevOps:
DevOps catalyzes software teams flow and feedback. Using CI/CD software teams produce faster to production. Customers have quick visibility to their product and services as features are released rapidly. Early visibility helps customers spot deviations in quality, which saves time and effort in long run.
Quick customer feedback will let software teams correct and re-orient their ways. Since instantaneous feedback prevents problems from cascading into larger problems, companies also save time and effort in the form of firefighting.
Automation and frequent checks provide guardrails for developers. Problems are caught during build instead of production. Intelligent instrumentation and capacity to quickly rollback last changes improve software teams response times. And also protects customers from a bad experience.
The biggest benefit for customers is cheaper prices. DevOps promotes self-servicing model which relies on automation. Automation saves companies money in the form labor costs and wastage. These savings make companies competitive and bring down their prices. Thus customers can enjoy economical prices for greater quality product and services.
