The term DevOps is a combination of two terms “development” and “operations.” In broader terms, the development and operation teams of an organization join forces to deliver quality software in minimal time. And to ensure a smooth flow of operations, the teams narrow down a set of practices or tools to ensure everyone is on the same page. Sure, DevOps may sound like some bizarre technology or something, which is actually not true. It is a type of service that controls everything from monitoring processes to maintaining communication between the teams to ensuring timely deliveries of software.
According to the survey carried out by Statista, approximately 80% of participants said DevOps is somewhat important; out of these, 48.1% of participants believed that it’s extremely important. These statistics are evidence of the growing popularity of DevOps among software development companies. DevOps business benefits are that it mainly focuses on practices to help develop and deliver products faster with the involvement of a smaller development team. This helps build better-quality products and reduces development costs. In this post, you’ll get to learn more about the ways DevOps services benefit businesses.
DevOps Business Benefits
#1 Increase in Frequency of Software/Service Deployments
DevOps services help improve and speed up the software deployment cycle. Software deployment is one of the most pivotal processes for any software development company. By employing DevOps services, companies can increase the frequency of software deployment by the right margin. DevOps services consist of a set of practices that help build better collaboration between teams that further help build and develop a product of better quality in a minimal time. Using DevOps, code updates or new features can be released several times in a day. DevOps helps businesses to maintain continuity in the deployment of software and new features.
#2 Improved Quality and Performance of the Deployed Apps
DevOps services have truly helped a lot in improving the quality and performance of the software under development. DevOps helps in developing quality software by building a creative and productive environment. It helps keep the whole team on the same page and work towards the same goal with real-time updates on the development and other changes. This helps streamline and synchronize operations between various teams, which is a vital ingredient for assuring the quality of the software. DevOps improves the code infrastructure and documentation by performing regular code reviews.
The primary factor behind better code quality is the combo of development and operations attributes it brings together. Moreover, continuous testing helps ensure that every part of the project holds the optimum quality and provides the desired performance. By improving code quality and synchronizing the operations in the software deployment process, DevOps becomes a significant quality assurance tool.
#3 A Reduction in Time Spent Fixing and Maintaining Apps
DevOps automates most of the processes in software development and deployment tasks with absolute accuracy and efficiency. DevOps automates testing and monitoring and performs them frequently, thereby ensuring that no threats or errors are missed or passed unresolved. Any imperfections or loopholes in the codes or any processes are detected earlier and resolved faster with the help of several teams bound by DevOps services. Manual testing and monitoring are quite tedious and time-consuming, but DevOps reduces this time to a great extent by automating the processes. This is how DevOps reduces time spent in fixing and maintaining applications.
#4 Reduced Time-to-market for the Software/Services
DevOps has significantly reduced the time to market the software and services by deploying quality applications and their updates faster. Faster and frequent deployments of services and software help companies stay ahead of the market competition. As discussed earlier, DevOps reduces the time spent in resolving errors and maintenance of the application; thus, new updates can be deployed sooner. These factors, like continuous integrations and delivery, efficient and streamlined operations, and good quality software, help reduce the overall time-to-market.
#5 Increased Collaboration Between Departments
Effective collaboration between various teams is vital for faster, more productive, and good-quality custom software development for any business. DevOps services help establish good communication between different departments and help them collaborate and work together. Good collaboration is vital to ensure that various operations or software development processes are synchronized to build the right quality product. For ensuring the quality of software, every department should work together with perfect collaboration. DevOps services ensure that any sudden plan changes are conveyed to the whole team in real time so that the entire team stays up to date and every part of the software is built with utter precision.
#6 Less Time Spent on Development, Testing, or Operations
When teams work together with good collaboration and communication, the output is more precise and matches expectations. Thus the overall software development time reduces considerably. DevOps services integrate continuous testing practices in software development. This constant testing automates the code tests and performs them at fixed intervals while the code is being written. This continuous testing helps detect and clear errors at an early stage to speed up the development process.
#7 New Software Services that Would Otherwise not Be Possible/Explored
DevOps, as we know, considerably reduces the developers’ burden by increasing their productivity. DevOps does so by replacing them doing repetitive tasks that often become boring and unproductive when done manually. So with ample time on their hands, the team can work and focus more on innovations, designing new software, innovating new features, etc. This is only possible when the developers have enough time on their hands to rest and concentrate on devising new ideas.
#8 Revenue Increase
DevOps plays a significant role in quality assurance and ensures that every software deployed meets optimal standards. Moreover, as already mentioned, DevOps services help improve the frequency of software deployment, thereby speeding the launching of new updates in the market. Better quality software and quick updates attract clients, which leads to more profit in terms of market share. Additionally, automation helps eliminate the need for manual intervention in redundant tasks and saves a considerable amount of development time and workforce. Thus fewer hours of manual tasks in the development and deployment of software lead to saving in manual costs.
#9 Attracting More Customers Using the Software/Services
DevOps helps build quality software as well as keep deploying the necessary upgrades at a rapid pace. Moreover, DevOps also ensures the software’s security through intense testing, thus providing a robust and secure application. This series of benefits help attract new customers and helps build customer trust, thus leading to higher customer retention rates. Once the software is launched in the market, it’s crucial to deploy frequent updates to keep customers entertained with new features and functionalities.
#10 Fewer Employees Working on the Development and Deployment of the Software/Services
As we know, DevOps brings automation in the process of software/services development and deployment. It reduces manual work in repetitive tasks like continuous testing, repeating the same code at various steps, etc. DevOps eliminates manual handling of such redundant tasks and saves a considerable amount of time and, most importantly, for the workforce.
Technical Benefits of DevOps
#1 Dynamic Iteration Cycle
DevOps services offer multiple benefits to businesses, but all of these perks have a joint base: automation. This is one of the significant benefits of DevOps services, of which all the other benefits are sub-parts. DevOps streamlines the workflow and makes collaboration between teams flawless, making the development processes more productive, efficient, and dynamic. Dynamic iteration allows the process to move faster but with shorter iterations. Shorter iterations help build accurate software by implementing smaller development cycles and even aids in frequent changes. This feature allows to clear of small errors or loopholes effortlessly and mitigates the possibility of any significant error arising at the end of the project, which is generally tough to solve.
#2 Process Automation
The biggest perk of employing DevOps services is that it automates almost all the tasks, which could be quite tedious when done manually. In software development, many jobs need to be carried out repeatedly. These tasks involve repeating the same process several times, which becomes very tedious, boring, and unproductive when done manually. Human resources can be used in more critical tasks, where hard work and manual intervention is needed. Thus DevOps services automate these repetitive tasks and perform them more efficiently and productively. Thus saving a significant amount of time for the workforce and money spent on the development team. Automation is essential when these repetitive tasks need to be done with utter precision and a good pace.
#3 Documentation & Code Synchronicity
Proper documentation is vital for any software development and deployment. Every business should have transparent and extensive documentation of all the critical information ranging from technical details to every little detail and changes made in the process. Usually, enterprises take documentation on a less priority basis and often neglect its importance, which often leads to lesser transparency among new team members. Proper and in-depth documentation and code synchronicity is vital and needs to be analyzed thoroughly whenever new developments need to be made.
Traditionally, documentation and code summary were managed mostly manually, but these tasks have become relatively more straightforward with DevOps services. DevOps induced transparency and order in the code structure that further helps comprehend the code very easily without heavy documentation. DevOps automates the whole process of code synchronicity and mitigates the tedious manual documentation needs.
#4 Good Environment for Technical Scalability
Scalability is a feature that makes products or systems capable of withstanding any overload when the size or functionalities of the software are altered. Every business works to build a scalable product that is capable of meeting variable demands. After a project or software is launched in the market, some specific features and functionalities need to be added in the future, depending on customer feedback. A product should have excellent scalability to withstand this load and meet the new demands. DevOps services help businesses to build scalable products. DevOps enables the software to function flawlessly under any size of loads.
#5 Continuous Integration & Delivery
Continuous integration and delivery are some of the best practices and perks of DevOps. This practice guides and enables the development team to focus more on meeting business goals, code quality, and security standards. Continuous integration means implementing minor changes or updates in the software frequently. At the same time, continuous delivery deals with automating the delivery or pushing these updates further to a respected environment. These changes might need to be conveyed to production, development, or testing departments. The feature of continuous delivery automates the delivery and communicates any updates of any size to the different departments.
#6 Efficient Communication
The software development team comprises various smaller teams that collaborate and work closely together to develop and deploy software. Most often, the lack of communication and synchronization becomes a barrier for developers to create successful software. DevOps have helped remove this communication barrier between teams to a great extent and enabled them to work together flawlessly with better synchronization of operations. DevOps helps every team member stay updated about any changes or information about the processes happening in software development and deployment. This way, DevOps ensures a better quality of the software by streamlining communication and creating a productive team environment.
#7 Better Team Scalability
With better documentation, code synchronicity, and excellent communication, team scalability becomes effortless. Usually, whenever a new member is added midway in the project, the newcomer and the team need to spend a lot of time to make him familiar with the project. But DevOps streamlines and simplifies the documentation and code synchronicity to the extent that it becomes a piece of cake for the newcomer to learn about the project. DevOps reduces the time taken by a new joinee in understanding the project and thus uses the best of him in building the project, and for faster deployment of the software, Thus DevOps improves the team scalability and allows the team to add new members effortlessly in the project.
#8 The Code Infrastructure Transparency
The code infrastructure should be transparent, and easier to understand and work on. As we already discussed, getting the joinee acquainted with the project is a significant and time-consuming task for any new member getting added to the team. Not only for team scalability, the existing members, too, sometimes need to read through the code infrastructure and documentation they have already worked on for better understanding or finding errors. If the code infrastructure is highly disorganized and convoluted, it becomes challenging, time-consuming, and inefficient for developers to find the mistakes. But DevOps simplifies the code infrastructure and makes it more transparent, more comfortable to go through, and seamless to maintain.
#9 Convenient Security Maintenance
Security is a feature that needs to be considered a priority, and security maintenance should start from the very beginning, not at the end of the project. Impenetrable security is an essential feature that every software needs to have to attract the market. DevOps services provide excellent protection and convenient security maintenance from the very start of the project. DevOps services help develop a productive ecosystem that helps identify and eliminate loopholes and code vulnerabilities in the project before they become a threat. DevOps security ensures that security covers every part of the software development throughout the product life cycle. Thus, helping to reduce or mitigate the possibilities of data breaches and other security threats and ensure the development of a robust application.
Why Does Your Business Need DevOps?
DevOps offers a range of benefits to businesses employing it in their software development and deployment lifecycle. DevOps enhances your business’s agility and helps in the rapid and frequent deployment of innovation and value to the market or, say, end-users. It brings automation to your business, which helps eliminate the amount of manual intervention in repetitive tasks and thus allows the employees to work productively on other critical and creative tasks. It saves time and money and improves productivity and frequency of deployment that further helps increase revenue too. Better services and application help improve customer satisfaction and experience, thus leading to better customer retention rates.
DevOps is a must for all businesses that are based on developing software and managing multiple servers. Big businesses like Amazon, Netflix, Target, etc., used to be entirely dependent on dedicated servers but now have employed DevOps in their businesses to deploy codes faster. Even small businesses or startups looking forward to deploying their innovation or launching an MVP can use DevOps services. While DevOps is proving beneficial for multiple companies, some don’t require these services at all. Those businesses that don’t require frequent software deployment and already work in highly regulated environments do not require this service.
Where to Find DevOps Companies?
Those looking for employing DevOps services have multiple choices like assigning the task to a trusted DevOps company, a bunch of experienced freelancers, or hiring an in-house DevOps engineer. GoodFirms is an ideal platform for those looking for DevOps companies; here, you’ll get a list of top companies, and you can compare them and find the perfect company that’ll fit your needs. It has been seen that ordering service from a DevOps company is a better option than the other two. Of course, employing freelancers is a pocket-friendly option. Still, on the other side, it’s highly irregular, and it’s possible that the same freelancer can be working on different projects at a time. Thus this divides their attention and often can lead to a quality-compromised project.
On the other side, hiring an in-house team is a good option if you want the job to be done in front of you and want the engineers to be present whenever you need them. But building a full in-house team is costly as the business will have to spend a lot of money in collecting appropriate tools and on the team. Compared to both of these options, hiring a DevOps service company is a more viable option for companies looking forward to standard quality and professional services. It’s also possible to hire a remote dedicated team that will work fully for you, but the risks and costs will be shared with the outstaffing company. Indeed it is costly too, but it’s worth spending money on a company that comes with many experts with years of experience and the best tools to work with.
Wrapping up
There is enough evidence in this post to conclude that DevOps services have entirely transformed the software development businesses. Its impact can be seen from the very day of employing the DevOps service. DevOps binds different teams together and creates a creative environment with no communication barriers. DevOps brings transparency to the project, thus helping the development, operations and other teams stay on the same page. Effective communication allows teams to work together to build a quality product in a lesser development time and cost. DevOps brings automation in the processes, thus automating most of the tasks like testing and security maintenance, thereby reducing the development team’s load. We can conclude that DevOps has given countless benefits to businesses and helped them build a standard quality product.
***The post is written by Shaun Williams, a content writer with Goodfirms, a research platform for Cloud Computing, Ecommerce companies, and Translation services companies, among many others.