DevOps Benefits to Scale Fast

If you're a developer, you're probably familiar with DevOps. However, you may not be familiar with all the ways that DevOps can help your business scale.

In this post, the Instatus team will be exploring how DevOps adoption can improve your company's ability to manage growth and stay competitive. We'll also look at some of the main benefits of DevOps for businesses.

So if you're curious about how adopting a DevOps mentality could help your business scale fast, keep reading!

What is DevOps?

DevOps is an incredibly misunderstood concept. Some see it as a job title. Others see it as a set of tools. Neither is entirely correct.

In reality, DevOps is a philosophy for software development that focuses on improving communication and collaboration between different teams within an organization.

The DevOps movement began in the early 2000s when software developers and IT/Ops professionals began raising concerns regarding the state of the industry. At the time, developers and IT/Ops professionals worked entirely separately from one another within their organizations.

Developers were responsible for building the product and getting it ready for release. IT/Ops professionals handled infrastructure, security and hosting, and software updates (among other things). Communication between these teams was poor. This severely limited the speed and quality of releases.

In response, influential professionals from both fields began brainstorming ways to overcome these limitations. And just like that, DevOps was born!

In a nutshell, here the benefits of DevOps for your company:

Better collaboration between teams
Pursuing a data-centric culture of improvement
Automating processes and reducing redundancies
Creating faster and shorter release cycles
Improved team morale

Let’s get into every single one of them.

How does DevOps actually work?

The DevOps movement started in an effort to improve communication between IT/Ops professionals and developers.

This philosophy is reflected through four main principles:

Collaboration: DevOps is all about adopting a holistic approach to problem-solving. Instead of individuals approaching problems from within their predefined roles, DevOps teams approach problems as a cohesive unit capable of finding optimal solutions.
Integration: DevOps adoption means breaking down the barriers that separate team members from each other. These barriers might be physical (e.g., separate offices), virtual (e.g., incompatible software), or interpersonal (e.g., lack of inter-team familiarity).
Measurement: DevOps emphasizes a culture of ongoing improvement. This means taking a proactive approach to monitoring your product, adapting it when necessary, and measuring its success when it changes or when you add new features.
Automation: DevOps recognizes that humans thrive when they're innovating and creating… and struggle when it comes to boring, repetitive work. In light of this, the philosophy calls for the automation of every task and workflow that can be automated with tools and software.

To summarize in practical terms, DevOps adoption relies on culture, tools, and organizational structure to connect previously separated development and IT/Ops teams.

Why is DevOps important?

Adopting a collaborative, holistic approach to problem-solving can help you stay competitive. Here are some DevOps benefits to take into account.

Intuitive Development

When developers can easily communicate with IT/Ops professionals about upcoming updates or features, they no longer have to worry about whether these changes will break something or affect performance in some unforeseen way.

Plus, when there's an established process for implementing new features (including quality assurance testing), developers save time because they don't need to waste their energy creating emergency fixes once the product has already been released.

Fewer Redundancies

Improved communication between different teams within your organization can reduce redundancies and save you money.

For example, rather than creating an entirely new tracking system for your newly launched features, you could integrate it with the software existing software or databases your teams already use.

Shorter Release Cycles

Since DevOps allows for the automation of much of the work involved in deploying and updating your product, it increases efficiency, reduces errors, and ultimately improves the customer's experience of your product.

Instatus is a great example of this philosophy of customer-focused automation in action. You can use Instatus to create beautiful status pages that automatically keep your customers informed and reduce the number of support tickets your team needs to deal with.

Improved Morale (and CX)

DevOps adoption helps show employees that they're valued, as they can contribute ideas towards improving the company's products and processes. Plus, having a culture that encourages open communication helps your employees connect with each other in meaningful, fulfilling, and mutually beneficial ways.

In a similar vein, DevOps is fantastic for improving CX around your product because it prioritizes proactive problem-solving. The goal is always to address problems before customer need to voice their concerns.

For example, Instatus allows you to automatically announce and explain service outages and downtime to your customers. This helps build a sense of trust, credibility, and appreciation.

How Can DevOps Help Your Business Scale?

There are four main ways that DevOps benefits that can help your business scale:

Improved Communication
Increased Innovation
Faster Adaptation
Faster Releases

Let's cover each of these points in a bit more depth!

Improved Communication

When IT/Ops professionals and developers work together seamlessly, they can improve productivity by curtailing each other's bottlenecks. This is especially important when it comes to scaling your business through new product development.

If your team's developers, designers, and software engineers are geographically dispersed, it can be challenging for them to work together in real time. However, with the right tools (e.g., video conferencing and documentation), you can overcome this issue and encourage meaningful collaboration that facilitates fast scaling.

Increased Innovation

With a unified team structure that encourages innovation, your business will have the means to stay ahead of the curve and iterate on new products. In other words, you'll be able to scale your ability to think big and analyze data creatively—which is key when it comes to remaining competitive in an increasingly agile marketplace.

Having a culture that encourages innovation helps your business scale because it enables you to try new things with minimal investment. This is especially important when testing the viability of an idea before launching multiple products in quick succession.

Faster Adaptation

When changes are properly tested, they're less likely to affect your product's performance. That means you can change or add features more frequently without negatively impacting customers' experiences with your business.

DevOps adoption allows for continuous deployment of updates meant to improve user experience or fix bugs. This means you can easily adapt to unexpected issues without experiencing downtime or delays.

When you can quickly release new features or updates with minimal downtime or disruption, you give yourself a better chance of staying one step ahead of your competitors in a fast-moving market.

Faster Releases

Since DevOps adoption streamlines the release process, it enables you to launch new features more quickly and maintain a competitive edge in today's fast-paced marketplace. Additionally, since any problems are spotted early on during implementation, developers don't need to waste their time creating last-minute fixes.

Reducing the amount of time required for updates and new features also allows you to release more frequently, which increases the frequency with which you can capitalize on opportunities.

In addition, better collaboration between DevOps teams means that they share valuable insights into the most effective ways to solve common challenges. This knowledge sharing reduces the number of roadblocks in your way, so you can adapt more quickly to changes in your industry or business environment.

DevOps as a Competitive Advantage

With all of this talk about DevOps, you might be wondering if it can really save you time and money. The answer is a resounding yes!

In fact, adopting a collaborative, holistic approach to problem-solving could help your company stay competitive in today's marketplace. These DevOps benefits make development processes faster and more efficient by connecting formerly separated teams within organizations that produce software and digital products.

When developers communicate with IT/Ops professionals about upcoming changes or updates to the product, they no longer have to worry about whether these changes will break something down the line. In addition to saving time, DevOps adoption also saves you money by reducing redundancies between different teams within your organization.

In conclusion, adopting DevOps benefits helps to increase communication between IT/Ops professionals and developers. This collaboration increase productivity, which can help companies stay competitive in today's fast-paced world. Plus, a collaborative approach helps streamline the development process so that you can release new features faster and maintain a competitive edge over your competition!