Why an Investment in DevOps is Worth it

The global pandemic challenged the best organizational infrastructures and accelerated digital transformation. Being the heart of digital transformation, DevOps enables businesses to improve through flexibility, agility, and continuous revision.
A report by AMR showed that the international DevOps market size was appreciated at $6.78 billion in 2020 and will reach $57.90 billion by 2030, reporting a CAGR of 24.2% from 2021-2030.

DevOps has transformed the software delivery process by increasing team collaboration and a flexible environment. The benefits of implementing the DevOps approach have made it immensely popular. About 83% of decision-makers said they’ve increased business potential and worth by implementing DevOps methodologies.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a collaborative approach of the software development and operations team combining concepts, cultural philosophies, techniques, and tools that enable organizations to enhance speed, efficiency, security, and customer experience to compete better in the market.

The DevOps culture promotes cross-team communication and team empowerment to integrate and automate software processes. Shared accountability and collaboration allow organizations to improve and evolve products faster than traditional software development.

Principles of DevOps

The DevOps methodology has four fundamental principles that form the best roadmap to modern software development. These principles guide towards improved planning, better product, and faster market delivery.

• Automation of the product development lifecycle
• Communication and Collaboration
• Intense focus on customer’s demands with brief feedback loops
• Waste minimization with constant improvement

Key Pioneers of DevOps

The formation of DevOps consists of Agile and ESM.

• Agile Software Development

DevOps is a projection of Agile that boosts strong team collaboration between developers, testers, management, and customers to finalize an improved product. It helps businesses identify communication and service delivery as crucial customer value proposition components.

• Enterprise Service Management (ESM)

Enterprise Service Management ESM is an extension of IT service management abilities further to enterprise teams like Finance, Human Resources, Marketing, Legal, and Facilities to manage business-centric use cases.

ESM allows the management of service demands and supplies through a standard catalog, facilitating faster workflow automation and innovation.
Initially, the system administrators defined the concept of DevOps and incorporated automation, the toolchain approach, configuration management, and system monitoring.

How does DevOps Work?

The DevOps approach breaks down the walls between operations and development teams, often merging them throughout the software development lifecycle with a multidisciplinary skillset. Some DevOps models integrate security and quality assurance teams for a seamless development process.

The integrated teams use technology stacks and tools to accelerate and automate reliable applications. These toolchains handle essential DevOps functions like collaboration, automation, continuous integration, and delivery.

The tech stacks and tools also enable engineers to perform tasks like code deployment without help that generally would need assistance from other teams.

Often the DevOps model is applied to organizational teams other than development, like security, where safety becomes the core part of the process. This model is the DevSecOps approach.

Challenges Faced in SDLC

The traditional Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) approach had several flaws that hindered seamless product development.

• The traditional approach ‘siloed’ the software development team, maintenance teams, and test engineers, where they performed tasks separately without communication. This model was time-consuming, and the end product came with several flaws.
• Test engineers faced issues maintaining a steady process in the different development stages. This issue also created bugs that were avoidable through inter-team collaboration.
• Bug fixes and fresh adjustments in the product took too long, ranging from several months to a year, due to the lack of collaboration between the developers and testers.
• Since the customers interacted with the product at the end, it gave rise to a lack of transparency, extra reworks, late feedback, decreased user satisfaction, and delays in working on the user’s complaints.

How DevOps resolves the SDLC Challenges

The DevOps model encourages collaboration and communication between the organizational teams during the development process and tears down all the barriers, solving most challenges. It helps the teams to form T-shaped competencies faster and energetically acclimates to market demands.

Benefits of DevOps for Enterprises

The State of DevOps Report of 2019 showed exceptional outcomes of adopting DevOps by IT organizations.

• 106 times swifter lead time from committing to the deployment stage
• 18 percent improvement in customer satisfaction
• 2604 times faster recovery from unexpected incidents and failures
• 22 percent minimized the time on unplanned work and rework
• 208 times more deployment frequency
• Two times more employee satisfaction, especially among high-performing teams
• Six times more accuracy in estimating operational costs
• Seven times lower failure change failure rate

Organizations adopting the DevOps model experienced a quintuple growth in the deployment frequency from 46x to 208x within a year from 2018 to 2019.

Also, 50% of DevOps enterprises reported reduced expenditure, time-to-market, and revenue growth.

Why Should Your Organization Invest in DevOps?

A study by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in 2021 shows that the main distinction between powerful and poorly performing teams is the successful integration of the DevOps model or the delay in implementing it.

Here are a few advantages of adopting the DevOps approach for your organization.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is one of the most significant advantages of adopting DevOps. This benefit is achieved by faster delivery, price deduction, transparency, and incorporation of feedback.

DevOps helps streamline several workflow areas, allowing you to charge less for your products than competitors not using the DevOps approach.

Streamlining enables collaboration between the organizational teams and the users, allowing transparency and user feedback and making it easier to finalize the desired product quicker.

Return IT Investments Rapidly

Releasing swift software updates, patches in code, and bug fixes helps corporations return their IT investments quicker and bring pristine revenue. High-performing DevOps organizations deploy 200 times more with about 2,555 times faster lead time compared to low performers. Also, better product quality in production environments saves 50% of the time on security issues, paving a speedier path to ROI.

To become a high-performing firm, your business’s current situation is crucial here. To start with DevOps, you must inspect your present situation and workflow. Also, you need to check your infrastructure state.

AWS tech professionals reveal all critical points, like the business processes you’ll need to induct for the most profitable results, and describe a perfect architecture. It describes six core pillars:

Graphic connecting: Robust Security, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, Reliability, Optimizing Costs, Sustainability.

• Robust Security: Security is a high-priority task in every development and establishment process. For robust security, the best methods are utilizing cloud capabilities, regulations of infrastructure protection, and providing more valuable data.
• Operational Excellence: One of the most optimal ways to support the development lifecycle. A perfectly timed operation runs applications efficiently.
• Performance Efficiency: Performance track the future. Performance Efficiency is utilizing Its resources most efficiently.
• Reliability: It defines the desired infrastructure state when every unit or module in the system performs its planned operation effectively.
• Optimizing Costs: Cost optimization is the intelligent way to produce more value at a reduced cost. It’s a practical approach to running workloads efficiently and cost-effectively.
• Sustainability: Sustainability manages your enterprise activities’ long-term environmental, economic, and societal impact.

Embedding all these six pillars to your organization will increase your organization’s ROI and decrease operational expenditure and TCO. These core pillars in your organization will give you 15-20% faster income growth.

How to Calculate ROI from DevOps?

On different aspects, ROI varies in DevOps. Although, there are ways to measure the ROI of DevOps:

1. Acceleration

• Automation: Reduced manual intervention and continuous testing to fix issues
• Infrastructure Retrieval: The swiftness of production recovery from incidents of collapses
• Frequency of Releasing: Speed of code releases to production
• Resilience of Infrastructure: Reducing downtime induced by infrastructure failures through automation
• Infrastructure Efficiency: Resource shielding to protect from production, and deployment failures
• Iterations: Number of modifications and fixes made from customer feedback and requests

2. Mindset

• Tech-oriented- Application, service, and hardware
• Procedure-oriented – Enhancing by continuous feedback loops, deploying and undertaking upgrades
• Employee-oriented – Prioritizing work grade and productivity

3. Performance

• Low IT Performers- Focus on opportunities and improvement areas to set measurable goals.
• Medium IT Performers- Reaps benefits by eradicating technological deficits and weighing value and velocity.
• High IT Performers- Targets high profits and foremost product delivery pipeline.

These are different ways to drive ROI in various aspects. But, there are some key factors as well that can affect ROI monetary values like-

Price of Introducing Process

Expenses of introducing processes begin from software development environments and processes to CI/CD. They all have a shared thread in spite of the changes available in individual working approaches.

Product Development Cost

Product development cost starts with the hourly expense of software product development. You can calculate the cost by multiplying the average yearly compensation and employer expenses and dividing this figure by the yearly working hours.

Expense Savings

Expense savings are accomplished by the successful integration of a specific DevOps model. It should have the accuracy to efficiently recognize the overall monetary benefit discovered through DevOps.

You can use this formula to convert ROI monetary value into ROI percentage:

Boosts Innovation & Development

The traditional SDLC (software development lifecycle) took long lead times and a longer time for patching the code and bug fixes. Various teams were responsible for writing, testing, and deploying code without seamless communication.

DevOps replaced the manual processes with automation and integrated all teams into a single environment. This reduces bugs, makes the team productive, and frees their time to focus on development, improvement, and innovation. Hire DevOps Engineer and harness the benefits.

Reduced Expenditure on IT Infrastructure Upkeep

Here’s how the DevOps methodology automates all software development processes and reduces monthly expenses.

Establishing CI and CD Pipelines, Continuous Delivery, IaC, Reduces Overprovisioning of the Resources, Cloud Migration

• Establishing CI and CD Pipelines: When CI and CD pipelines in workflow lower the MTTR (mean time to resolution), the development team can focus on improving the product quality and feature releases. Automating software tests ensures that codes deployed in short clusters won’t impact the infrastructure and prevent bugs from escaping to production.

Reduced bugs and MTTR sidestep consistent poor workflows and technical deficits.

• Continuous Delivery: It is the most substantial aspect of DevOps. After passing through a testing environment, the code is transferred from the development stage to the release stage. The developers can release updates and fix bugs faster. Continuous Integration enables them to upload code.
• Infrastructure as a Code (IaC): The fundamental key of the DevOps model enables the automation of routine tasks. The IaC approach hit two targets with one arrow: it eliminates the Dev team’s responsibility for infrastructure provisioning, permitting them to avert human intervention blunders and concentrate on product innovation and enhancement.
• Reduces Overprovisioning of the Resources: Private cloud providers ensure that your system uses the CPU effectively and all complimentary RAM with container orchestration tools.
• Cloud Migration: It decodes ineffective use of resources. Public cloud providers like GCP, Microsoft Azure, and AWS guarantee smart use of resources through load balancing and auto-scaling. The best part is that you only pay for the cloud features you employ.

These are the five most crucial factors that show how DevOps helps lower the bills of an IT infrastructure.

Promotes Collaborated and Engaged Efforts

DevOps accentuates a collective approach and collaboration at all software development levels, from coding and testing to monitoring, release, and updates.

This system allows developers, system administrators, and testers to communicate seamlessly and work effectively as they work in an integrated environment to maintain uniformity across all functions.

Team members in a DevOps model also embrace multiple roles to accomplish tasks, increasing organizational efficiency and roles and responsibilities. This also encourages the team members to improve their skills for a seamless product development lifecycle and seamless user experience.

DevOps also increases employee productivity and satisfaction. By implementing DevOps, the software developed is error-free and efficient. Lesser bugs mean the team members spend less time fixing them, enabling them to work on working and creating better products.

When the development and operations teams spend less time patching bugs and support, it reduces their stress, allows them to enjoy their work, and increases job satisfaction.

Lesser Chances of Failures

The State of DevOps Report shows that businesses adopting a DevOps model experience reduced failures by 60 times.

DevOps aims to promote team collaboration, where the members understand all functions in the development lifecycle, from infrastructure to configuration. This also allows developers to write and fix code simultaneously, reducing the prospect of bugs.

Before releasing the product, the users get to use and give feedback if problems emerge, allowing developers to fix and instantly release the update without much delay.

Enhanced Service Availability

Gartner stated in its study that the average IT downtime cost for large firms could reach $5,600 each minute.

Even if it is not a significant issue, enterprises from inaccessibility for their services to customers, on average, can lose from $140,000 to $300,000 each hour. Mid-size businesses and startups also suffer from downtime, making them lose potential investors and customers.

Prominent market players who embraced DevOps to annihilate unavailability can save up to $100,000 every hour of decreased downtime. DevOps boosts your service availability through the implementation of:

• IaC (Infrastructure-as-a-Code) enables standard tasks’ automation, reduces human intervention, enhances stability, makes testing more effective, and insinuates system consistency. You can implement this strategy through tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Pulumi.
• Facilitating the CI and CD workflow and IaC to identify unstable updates with the infrastructure and preclude the deployment to delivery.

Enhances Security and Reduces Risks

DevOps helps organizations mitigate risks and enhance security by:

• Creating automated testing environments and predefined compliance measures that integrate into the environment. This allows team members to identify the bugs while writing and testing the code simultaneously.
• Reducing human intervention and errors by automating tasks
• Incorporating the Infrastructure as a Code (IaC) model eliminates manual intervention and governs infrastructure configuration.
• Assisting organizations to adapt to market changes faster by promoting an agile and flexible work environment.
• Ensuring better adherence to compliance measures, like the PCI-DSS, by utilizing Policy as a Code model for managing and defining rules and conditions.

Implementing DevOps? Partner with OnGraph To Accelerate Your Business

To summarize, a well-planned DevOps implementation strategy can drastically increase the proficiency of your end-to-end delivery pipeline.

If you own a startup in the initial stage, we recommend you adopt the DevOps model so that you can scale your business rapidly. The adoption might be more challenging for large enterprises but is worth it, given the result in security, reliability, and scalability.

We at OnGraph, with 14 years of industry experience, can assist your business in developing a DevOps strategy by using containerization, integrating your environment with CI/CD Tools, automating tests and tasks, and monitoring application performance.

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