DevOps Implementation: Is it Really Worth an IT Company's Investment?

Today, DevOps has emerged as the future of the software delivery process. Companies are shifting their focus on optimizing software quality and time to market while leveraging automation tools across different phases of the product development lifecycle (Design, build, test & Deploy).

Over the past couple of years, IT companies have rapidly shifted to DevOps business models. Around 77% of organizations today use DevOps to deploy software or plan releases. The main reason behind its quick adoption is the ability to deliver applications and innovation faster with minimum time-to-market for dynamic software products. 

The latest stats show that DevOps popularity has taken a significant hike in the past few years. DevOps consulting has become an integral part of IT companies' revenue generation. Based on the experience of the top survey firms, the overall 2021 DevOps market will be worth around USD 5,114.57 Million and reach USD 12,215.54 Million by 2026.

One may say that the purpose of DevOps implementation is to reduce the IT budget. Still, we can’t deny that its adoption can generate additional revenues for an organization because top companies claim that DevOps adoption saves around $1.3 million annually per 100 DevOps users due to improved infrastructure performance by 66% and increased deployment frequency 85%.

Undoubtedly, DevOps implementation has skyrocketed over the past several years. These striking figures are testament to its potential as a business outcome game-changer. 

Therefore, DevOps implementation has become a popular buzzword in the IT industry, and many software companies are considering it as their next move. But is DevOps implementation worth investing in at an IT company? 

This article will provide you with the correct answer and share deep insights about DevOps, its popularity, and the benefits of implementing it into your business. So, let's get started.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is basically a software development method that emphasizes communication, collaboration, and integration between the various roles in an IT company. It aims to improve relationships between developers and other departments such as operations or QA to produce better products for their customers. In addition, DevOps also offers numerous benefits, from improving productivity to increasing revenue growth. 

Let's look at the rise of DevOps, how it works, why it has become popular, and how it’s beneficial.

The Rise of DevOps

Patrick Debois initially coined DevOps in 2009, but its popularity started to skyrocket after Amazon's CTO Werner Vogels published his keynote speech about their success with implementing DevOps practices in 2012. In addition, many tech giants like Facebook and Google also started to use DevOps in their products. Since then, it has become a popular buzzword in the IT industry.

How Does DevOps Work?

DevOps Solutions brings together development, QA, and operations into one team. They work closely to share their knowledge to achieve the best product at the end of it all. It involves automating processes that allow developers early access to production code without compromising security standards or compliance requirements.

Why Implement DevOps?

Now that you know how DevOps works let's see why it has become popular.

According to Gartner, the rise in IT spending is expected to hit $4.2 trillion in 2021, a hike of 8.6% from 2020. It means companies are willing to invest more money in their business because of its astounding benefits.

DevOps is a way for companies to keep up with the market demands by providing more flexible, agile software products that adapt quickly to changing needs or trends. Furthermore, it also helps IT companies improve their organizational culture and boost innovation within their team. Many studies have shown how DevOps implementation can increase productivity across departments by up to 200%.

Business Advantages of DevOps Implementation

Besides increasing your profits and revenue growth faster than ever before, here are other benefits you can gain from implementing DevOps:

1. Continuous Delivery & Deployment

Implementing a DevOps culture will allow you to release new updates faster which improves the customer experience. In addition, the updates are also more stable since both developers and operations have tested them before being released.

Flipkart, one of the largest e-commerce companies in India, has reduced the time it takes to release new updates from several weeks down to just a few minutes. It is possible because Flipkart's developers can deliver any software changes they want directly into production without involving other roles first.

"We don't have separate handoffs between teams," said Flipkart's VP of engineering Ravi Garikipati. "Our developers can deploy code to production whenever they want."

2. Increasing Revenue Growth Faster Than Before

Since DevOps allows you to release new updates faster, it means that your customers can receive the benefits of these changes much earlier than before. And when they are happy with their experiences using your product, they will probably recommend it to their friends or colleagues, which will help you increase your revenue growth.

"The goal of our DevOps transformation is to reduce deployment failure rates, increase deployments per day, shorten lead times for releases (time between code check-in and release), improve customer satisfaction through faster time-to-market responsiveness," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, Director of Product Engineering at Capital One Financial.

When Netflix decided to switch from a monolithic architecture based on JVM and Tomcat, they were expecting their whole development suite would take them at least nine months. However, thanks to the DevOps culture that has been implemented in their company, it took them only three months instead.

"We had researchers who knew Java develop some libraries using a new framework, and a team of experienced front-end engineers who knew JavaScript develop some applications on top of these libraries. The next step was to have the two teams work together to share their code," said Chris Pinkham, VP Engineering at Netflix.

"Once we had both sides working off of common code that they both wrote, we were able to have them working together in a single-day code review. The team was so excited by this that it took us longer to negotiate an agreement on how the remaining pieces would come together than it did for us to get the code merged," said Pinkham.

3. Increased Collaboration & Communication

A DevOps culture allows your employees, whether developers or operations professionals, to work together more closely than ever before to deliver new updates faster without sacrificing the quality of their software development efforts. It is one of the main reasons why many companies have been implementing DevOps. It allows them to work more efficiently and have better coordination between the roles and operations professionals.

"In a DevOps world, development teams can provision their environments for testing purposes with full access to production data if needed," said Alan Lepofsky, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. "Testing gets done, often with production data. With more testing and better quality software releases, you can get to market faster."

According to a survey conducted by Puppet, companies implementing DevOps were able to reduce their downtime from an average of five hours per week down to only one hour and thirty-two minutes per week. In addition, they also managed to achieve this with fewer required resources, which means that the success rate was much higher.

"It is one of the main reasons why companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google have been able to remain competitive in today's market. They are constantly improving their software development process by increasing collaboration between developers and operations professionals," said Sam Fell, VP of Product Marketing at CA Technologies.

4. Improved Business Agility

Companies implementing DevOps can improve their overall software development process, allowing them to be more agile and adaptable to the ever-evolving needs of today's market. It is one of the main reasons why so many businesses have begun adopting this strategy. It can help companies remain competitive by allowing them to adapt to their customers' ever-changing needs quickly.

E.g., companies implementing DevOps have also experienced a much higher success rate when it comes to delivering their software updates since they don't waste time going back and forth with developers to resolve any issues, which means that fewer resources are needed overall.

"DevOps is about breaking down barriers between development and operations and creating a culture that fosters collaboration and communication. DevOps increases the speed of business by allowing development teams to be more agile, collaborate better with other departments in their organization, and ultimately produce higher quality software," said Travis Truett, Co-founder & VP Product at CloudBees.

5. Improved Business Results

Organizations have to be committed to implementing it as a way for their teams to collaborate and converse with each other more effectively to deliver better software updates faster rather than focusing on traditional methods frequently becoming inefficient over time. In fact, by improving communication between your employees, you can see a wide range of benefits, including higher productivity levels and better in-house collaboration, which ultimately results in improved business performance.

Copado's results after Investing in Devops.
Source   

By implementing DevOps, your company will improve its overall software development process by allowing all team members, from developers to operations professionals, to work together without wasting time on traditional methods that often become inefficient.

6. Increased Software Quality

When you have your entire team involved in the development process for new or updated software, the chances of delivering better results are higher. Everyone has their unique perspective on what needs to be improved rather than simply relying on developers alone. It means that when teams are all working together towards achieving one common goal, the chances of success are higher than working in isolation.

Amazon, for example, has reduced its software bug backlog from hundreds of thousands down to only an average of fifteen per month. It is partly due to their commitment towards DevOps, which has allowed the entire team, including developers and operations professionals, to work together more effectively to deliver their software updates faster without wasting time on traditional methods that frequently become inefficient.

7. Boosts Return on Investment

DevOps improves the software development process by allowing all team members, from developers to operations professionals, to work together without wasting time on traditional methods that often become inefficient. It means you can see better business results overall and increased ROI for your IT Company. However, this is only possible if the entire team is committed to improving their communication and collaboration skills.

E.g., Alibaba has reduced its time for software build and deployment by almost 75% since it began implementing DevOps, making its developers much more productive overall.

DevOps Implementation Roadmap: A Step-by-Step Guide 

Implementing DevOps is only possible if the entire team working on new or updated software updates is committed to improving their communication and collaboration skills. However, you can quickly achieve this by following a specific roadmap that includes small incremental changes in your company's processes over time.

"You can achieve small wins, which are crucial to building momentum in the organization," Travis Truett added.

Below is a roadmap that you can follow when implementing DevOps in your IT Company:

DevOps Initiative

The first step towards improving communication and collaboration skills is to designate a small team within your organization that will oversee this process.

E.g., Alibaba has appointed a chief architect who oversees their DevOps initiative, which was the first step towards implementing it in their entire IT Company.

"He's the executive sponsor for DevOps," Travis Truett said. "So he has to have a seat at the table."

Since it is often difficult to get your entire company on board with this idea, you should consider forming a small team that will spearhead this initiative and help build momentum throughout other departments in time. You can do this by appointing a senior manager who is already respected within your company.

Communication

Once you have your small team in place, the next step is to improve communication within it.

E.g., "There's no way of getting around that if we want DevOps implementations to succeed," Travis Truett explained. "We need great collaboration between development and operations."

Communication plays an important role here since all team members involved in developing new or updated software should communicate more effectively.

Travis Truett adds: "We need to make sure we're all working together and there's good communication between developers, operations professionals, and IT managers."

Since it is easy for some team members to feel excluded from this process due to their lack of communication, you should ensure that everyone feels comfortable contributing their ideas.

Automation

Once the team is on board with improving communication and collaboration skills, it's time to automate some parts of the development process.

The next step towards implementing DevOps in Alibaba was automating their software build processes to reduce its deployment timeframe by almost 75%. It has allowed developers to be more productive overall, which was the primary goal of implementing DevOps.

"It's a process that automatically builds and deploys code," Travis Truett added. "From development to production."

Automation should be implemented in stages where your team can easily monitor its progress until it becomes second nature to them. Small wins are crucial here because they help build momentum in the organization.

Collaboration

After your team has taken on more responsibilities through automation, it's time to improve collaboration between all members.

One way Alibaba achieved this was by introducing a new chat platform that allows developers and operations professionals to quickly communicate with each other in real-time once they encounter problems or need some advice about something.

If there's a problem in the middle of the night, operations can pop into a chat room," Travis Truett explained. "And tell developers what they're seeing and ask them to look at something."

It has helped Alibaba decrease its mean time to recover from failures by almost 95% and reduced production incidents by over 40%.

"You should always have to keep your eyes on the prize and focus on making things better." Travis Truett added. "That's what we've done for Alibaba Cloud, and it has paid off in spades so far."

Collaboration plays an important role here as all team members should work together towards a common goal. By focusing on small wins and keeping an eye on the big picture, your team can successfully implement DevOps in Alibaba Cloud.

Important Success Factors

At this stage, your team has already implemented some of the essential DevOps principles.

E.g., one of the most important things to consider at this point is making sure that everybody is on board with these changes and they become second nature for them, which you can achieve through constant communication, transparency, and training.

As for critical success factors, you should ensure that all team members are responsible enough to implement DevOps properly. You should provide them with the necessary tools and resources they need to get started. Your company can successfully achieve its goals through this process.

Final Thoughts

Implementing DevOps at your company can be a complex process, but the benefits outweigh the challenges. As you have read in this blog post, you can improve teamwork and collaboration within your company by offering them the right tools and resources they need to succeed.

With all your company's efforts, you should ensure that it's worth the investment through constant communication and transparency with your team. That's what becomes possible with DevOps implementation, which can be a challenging yet rewarding process for your organization.

For better assistance, you can also connect with a DevOps services company. They can help you achieve your goals through this process and provide the right solutions to meet your business needs.

FAQs

Q. What is DevOps?

A. A software development methodology that allows developers and IT professionals to work together more productively.

Q. Is it necessary to work with a third-party company for DevOps implementation?

A. Yes, you can take the help of DevOps Company to implement successfully.

Q. What are the benefits of implementing DevOps at my company?

A. You will be able to reap various business advantages when it comes to improving teamwork within your organization, enhancing communication, increasing transparency, and more.

Q. How will the implementation of automation improve my business processes and infrastructure?

A. With automation, your company can become more efficient and save time. You will be able to improve collaboration between all team members through the implementation of DevOps.

Q. Can you provide some examples of companies that have successfully implemented DevOps in their organization?

A. Alibaba Cloud, Netflix, and Amazon are examples of companies that have successfully implemented DevOps.

Q. What does the roadmap look like for a company looking to implement DevOps?

A. There is no specific road map required as it's all about how you want your organization to work. It can be anything from improving transparency within your business to improving communication, etc.

Q. Will anything change after implementing DevOps principles at our company, e.g., training and communication?

A. Yes, it will be a positive change in the long run. You might experience some resistance initially, but eventually, everyone will get used to their new roles and responsibilities, which is good for your business.