Five key advantages of DevOps

If you ask one or two people about what DevOps is and you’ll be amazed by the variety of their responses. Some will speak of automation and tooling. Some will mention the alignment of teams and structures. You’ll likely receive an answer that explains how DevOps is perceived in the person’s workplace, and it will probably highlight the benefits they’re getting from it.

Although every opinion has an element of truth at the core, DevOps is coalescing development and operations. It’s an easy method of approaching the concept. Instead of having development hand over code to operations to deploy, release, and keep track of software (dev then operations), DevOps has both teams working side-by-side (dev and operations).

You’ve probably heard more and more about DevOps as many organizations are adopting it, and with good reason. Employees are looking to hire professionals who have DevOps Certification. DevOps was praised for its ability to shorten development times, leading to an improved experience for the company and the end-users. 

These are the five main advantages you can expect to reap from adopting DevOps.

1. Renewing focus on the customer

One of the important reasons for the switch to DevOps is that it puts teams back to an attitude of the client. When it comes to the world of software development, it is easy to get caught up in believing that the aim is terrific software. This mentality makes it easy to justify lengthy development and release times since the software will look stunning at the final stage.

This is a myth due to two reasons. One, even with an extended development timeframe, who’s to say that the software is superior? More importantly, focusing on the software will make one forget the client’s most important factor. The client seeks an answer, a product that can solve their problems. They aren’t concerned about the process itself, and they want to ensure that they get a quality product. DevOps typically puts your customers in their shoes since you’re focused on more minor releases and have more opportunities for immediate feedback.

2. Teams unite to speed up product delivery.

Another advantage that comes with DevOps can be that teams, including operations, can enjoy the benefits of working in a dynamic or iterative setting. Over the past ten years, development teams invested in agile development and started developing faster and faster. Since this has happened, the operations teams have had a hard time keeping up and can’t launch the software at the same speed in isolation. DevOps brings these teams together and delivers software faster. Is a quicker development timetable important to customers? Yes, of course. If you can complete the work twice as fast and maintain the high quality you produce, you’ve got an edge in the competition.

3. Simplifies development focus

There are two options to create to release a product: 

Either a significant release that combines many features into one release or a quick release, in which features are rolled out one by one. If you are planning a significant release, you’re concerned about the order of features included in the release since you cannot significantly alter that list once you’ve started. If you decide to make significant changes, you need to think about the work already completed before changing things. The various features in a release can be entangled.

However, you can drastically simplify organizing your work by reducing how much work you complete at any specific period. Every day or week, your team tackles a specific element and then packs the development and release process into the same system. If there is a problem, it’s only one issue to consider instead of a major release, where you’d be wasting time trying to sort through numerous problems.

4. Automates the development process.

Technologists and developers, in general, do not spend enough time automating their systems to aid themselves. Why? When your company has historically conducted significant releases, there’s no need to. There are new deployments that occur several times every year. So why should you think about automating? But, with speedier, more minor releases happening more frequently, a more smooth deployment, aided by automation, can save a considerable amount of time. 

What are the things you can automate? Begin by automating the everyday aspects of your release. There are usually aspects of writing specifications and testing which can be automated. Be careful not to automate and create new tools for technology to make it easier. Be aware of why you’re automating them and the benefits of time savings you’d like to gain. Every automation will not be worthy of the time and effort it requires to create.

5. Supports end-to-end responsibility

In addition, although DevOps usually focuses on development and operations, this model could and should impact other aspects that you run. Think about the numerous people involved in making software available to the market. There’s more to it than DevOps. When creating software, specifications need to be established, and expectations negotiated with the client. Once the software has been completed and released, validation, education, and providing feedback to developers is essential.

In this regard, the issues that DevOps solves must be highlighted by other areas in your business that require coalescing. Innovative approaches can benefit all within the organization, not just the tech experts.

Conclusion

To remain competitive in the present competitive market, you must be more efficient and precise than your competition. DevOps can help you achieve this by helping your teams concentrate on the user experience and bringing teams together for faster shipping of product, simplifying the objectives of every release, adding automated processes (which helps reduce errors and frees up developer time for different tasks), and creating feedback loops which benefit all employees.