Ultimate Guide to DevOps: What is it and why you should invest in it

You might have heard about DevOps and its importance to company development. But what is DevOps, and why should you use it? DevOps is a way for companies to combine their departments for faster deliverables and better quality of work. For example, if you have a bakery, some employees do the production, and others contact suppliers to provide the ingredients. You then bring those teams together to ensure maximum results to avoid things getting messy with miscommunication and risk your business’s stability. Having an efficient and beautifully designed status page is essential for building trust with your team. At Instatus, we know the value of automating your processes and creating a shared culture for your workers.

In this article, we will go over:

• DevOps: definition and popularity
• Why is DevOps important in software development
• What are the benefits of DevOps
• How can you use DevOps for teamwork
• What are the roles in a DevOps team
• What is a DevOps workflow

Let’s dive in!

DevOps: Definition and Popularity

DevOps is the set of practices, tactics, tools, and processes for combining the company’s development (Dev), operations (Ops), and testing departments. DevOps aim to provide high-quality services, usually in terms of software, while fostering collaborations between cross-functional teams. DevOps popularity has been growing non-stop, with recent studies indicating that by 2025 it will have reached $12.58 billion in the market. The reason for its popularity is that it delivers faster innovation, higher reliability, increased efficiency, and customer satisfaction. To achieve great results, experts of DevOps focus on excellent communication and continuous improvement of their systems. According to DevOps stats, by 2016, 74% of companies used DevOps in their processes, 16% weren’t adopting DevOps, and 10% were undecided. The numbers are truly impressive and indicate that DevOps will be growing significantly in the next few years!

Why is DevOps Important?

Let’s put it this way: how much time and money will your company save by having a go-to system for aligning your teams together? Or in other words: why DevOps? A company’s success is measured by how fast it delivers innovation compared to its competitors. Unfortunately, when your team gets its hands on a brand new software development project, it’s usually hard to predict the exact time frameworks. Combine this with having your teams work separately with a lack of proper communication and a slow process of testing and feedback, and you have the perfect plan to failure. So why DevOps? DevOps shortens your system’s development life cycle by bringing 60% faster results. It also provides a faster plan to customer support in case of unplanned outages.

The Benefits of DevOps

Companies haven’t adopted DevOps so quickly by chance.

Here are the five most important advantages of DevOps:

1. Improved communication and collaboration

Thanks to DevOps’s efficient collaboration, trust is built between teams. Company culture is cultivated, and instead of individual goals, teams focus on performance. With experts working together, it’s faster to spot software defects and resolve them while exchanging experience and viewpoints. DevOps collaboration benefits create happy teams that are more productive, experimental, and innovative.

2. Increased efficiency with automation

One of DevOps’s advantages is that it can easily be automated. Automation equals speeding up the development process, thus saving the company time and money. In addition, the amount of manual work required is minimum. Through this DevOps benefit, developers can focus on the task at hand, therefore, building a competitive advantage. All that without sacrificing security, as the DevOps model provides automated security testing tools and integrations.

3. Customer Satisfaction

Whatever you do, don’t disappoint the customer! One of the most important factors in measuring business success is customer satisfaction. One of the most significant DevOps advantages is that it’s built around a customer-centred approach. Failure is expected in all endeavours at some point. What matters the most is recovery time, listening to your customers’ feedback, and meeting their needs. DevOps systems are flexible and adaptable to change based on circumstances.

4. Reliability and Scalability

Reliability in its core means quality and stability. DevOps focuses on continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to ensure reliable and high-performance deliveries. It’s manageable at scales and therefore reduces risks.

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5. Reduced costs and time to market

All the above DevOps benefits indicate reduced company expenses and faster marketing deliverables. With fast procedures, high-quality products, and excellent team communications, DevOps inevitably leads to a cost-effective strategy in the long run. According to Kevin Murphy, companies that adopted DevOps saw a 35% decrease in their needs for IT staff. Faster deliveries also mean faster launches and subsequently a competitive advantage to innovation.

How can you use DevOps for Teamwork?

So you understood the importance of DevOps, and you’re now ready to take the next step towards organising your team to the DevOps model. Although the implementation of DevOps may differ from company to company based on different goals, cultures, and processes, we gathered five fundamental principles on how you can prepare your team to use DevOps.

1. Establish a collaborative environment where employees feel safe working together, rely on their team, focus on solutions, feel free to experiment and be happy to contribute.
2. Cultivate a team performance approach rather than finger-pointing individuals. Hold the whole team accountable for success or mistakes and never ask one person to be solely responsible.
3. Put the customer in the centre of the team’s attention. Stretch out the importance of considering customer feedback and constantly improving procedures to meet their needs.
4. Automate, automate, automate! Avoid manual integrations as much as possible to speed up the development and delivery process.
5. Take the feedback and move on. Improve what can be improved and learn from your mistakes.

What are the Roles in a DevOps Team?

DevOps teams usually consist of experts from both the development and the operations department. Here is an example of a company’s structure using DevOps:

1. DevOps Evangelist - Usually the professional who introduces DevOps to the whole team and is in charge of adopting and implementing it.
2. Release Manager - Also known as the product manager who is in charge of the coordination, supervision, and management of the whole project.
3. Automation Engineer - Since DevOps is based on automation, this role is crucial to suggesting and creating automation and finding the right DevOps tools for different processes.
4. Software Developer/Tester - The product builder responsible for writing the codes and performing the tests.
5. Experience Assurance Expert - Focused on quality control and user experience. They have the customer in the centre of their attention.
6. Security and Compliance Engineer - They ensure that the product complies with regulations and is safe against possible attacks.
7. Utility Tech Players - The passe-partout that can fit in all roles with ease. They have a varied skill set to meet unpredicted needs when they appear.

In a DevOps environment, these seven roles work together in a collaborative spirit to ensure maximum results and efficiency.

What is a DevOps Workflow?

So you got your team ready, the roles are set, now what? It’s time to set up your DevOps workflow!

DevOps is focused on agile development from start to finish. Therefore, determining your workflow will also help you find the right tools for each step of the process. Here is an overview of DevOps workflow phases:

1. Planning - Plan your strategy and track your tasks. Identify what needs to be done, what tasks are complete, and what tasks are at hand.
2. Building - Build your code and make alterations to avoid bugs and errors.
3. Testing and Delivering - Quality test the products to ensure performance and customer satisfaction. When necessary, deliver updated versions of the product.
4. Gathering - Gather customers’ feedback and make alterations to fulfil their needs.

Once you’ve established your DevOps workflow, it’s time to pick effective tools for each phase of the process. They will automate manual processes and keep your team aligned and confident in their work. You made it to the end. Congrats! Remember that DevOps comes with many benefits to your overall corporate culture and also product delivery. Now that you know what DevOps is and have the ultimate guide to start implementing it in your company, it’s time to take the next step!

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