DevOps in Enterprise: Improved Business Productivity and Performance

Does DevOps work only for startups? Let’s debunk this myth right off the bat. No, it doesn’t. And digging a bit deeper into the topic, it would be fair to say that while in startups DevOps adoption may seem seamless, in enterprises, overcoming the fear of implementing DevOps can lead to impressive results. This assumption is backed by a recently published Acumen Research and Consulting report. The report titled “DevOps Market Size, Share, Analysis Report and Region Forecast, 2022 – 2030” says: The Global DevOps Market size accounted for USD 7,398 Mn in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 37,227 Mn by 2030 with a considerable CAGR of 20% during the forecast timeframe of 2022 to 2030. In this article, we will observe what makes a successful DevOps practice, the main challenges of DevOps implementation in an enterprise, and how this methodology, once applied, can maximize business efficiency.

What is DevOps?

At the heart of DevOps lies cultural transformations. By cultural transformations, DevOps evangelists mean the changes in the mindset, i.e. in the approaches to the development and deployment processes. First of all, it implies overcoming siloed Dev and Ops teams’ mentality for the sake of the combined power of the two named groups. And secondly, it implies leveraging the best practices, including automation and innovative tools, as well as incorporating structural changes to accelerate the development of new applications and ease up the maintenance of the existing ones.

What makes a successful DevOps practice?

Below we will list 4 key components that can yield victory in the company’s DevOps initiatives.

• Automation

Automation plays an integral role in DevOps. Automating a wide range of mundane processes, from coding and deployment to monitoring and quality assurance, fuels team flexibility and cooperation.

• Cooperation

Organizational silos are a significant obstacle in building a seamless operational flow. Hence it is crucial to set up collaboration morale by breaking down any hurdles among stakeholders, developers and Information Technologies Operations’ (ITOps) administrators. This also implies implementing effective company-wide communication.

• Agility

All parties within the DevOps adoption practice should be adjustable to new technologies and services and ready to update tools and processes.

• Code ownership

The concept of owning your code is the main trigger in increasing developers’ role at every stage of software delivery, from coding and code deployment to monitoring apps in production.

Key challenges of DevOps adoption in an enterprise

For enterprises, the idea of DevOps adoption may seem daunting. There are multiple reasons why. Let’s disclose 3 key challenges slowing down companies’ initiatives towards DevOps.

Challenge 1. A shift from legacy applications to microservices

The transition from legacy systems to microservices implies having a basis for automation, configuration management and continuous delivery in place in order to manage the gradually increasing operational workloads associated with microservices. However, these changes seem trivial compared to the bunch of issues legacy systems may cause, including instability, lack of support, losing on innovations, and falling behind the competitive market.

Challenge 2. The conflict between the development and operations teams’ toolset

The diverse toolset and metrics these two teams work with may lead to natural resistance to any significant changes in the usual workflows and routine. The solution, though not the easiest one, can be cooperation between teams with the primary goal of making a universal system by integrating the tools of both teams and unifying the metrics they track. Yes, sometimes, to embrace innovation and make a step forward, you need to be ready to sacrifice your well-established routine and customs.

Challenge 3. Cultural changes

The Dev and Ops mentality prevailing in most organizations is often a stumbling block to adopting the DevOps methodology.  Historically development and operations teams got used to maintaining diverse functions and sticking to counter goals. However, integrating two siloed teams should become the highest priority for the management willing to push forward the DevOps practice. By setting common objectives, building up a proper resource management strategy and identifying product owners, enterprises can boost the movement from a siloed culture to a unified DevOps system.

Benefits of DevOps implementation for enterprises

Among the numerous benefits of DevOps for organizations, some critical pros directly impact companies’ profitability and cost-effectiveness.

• Minimum production costs

Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Infrastructure as Code principles lying beneath the DevOps methodology are aimed at consistency across task scenarios and infrastructure integrity. As an outcome, a company achieves fully automated development lifecycle operations while eliminating time and resources associated with mundane manual work. Besides minimizing production costs, DevOps tackles inefficient resource use by using cloud migration. Through automated scaling and load balancing, cloud service providers help companies reduce inefficiency within a company. Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services are well-known examples of such cloud migration service providers.

• Faster ROI

Accelerated update rollouts and bug-fixing cycles lead to a faster return on investments for organizations. Moreover, a higher product quality results in a reduction of time spent on resolving security issues. For some organizations, this time can be reduced by more than 50%. So it means seamless applications that bring more profit. Additionally, faster ROI is bolstered by the potential reduction of your product cost compared to the ones offered by competitors who miss out on implementing the latest DevOps practices.

• Enhanced customer experience

What do clients hate the most? Waiting. And the longer the unreasonable waiting time is, the lower the clients’ expectations about your services are. Accelerated software delivery guaranteed by DevOps can directly impact a customer satisfaction rate. Moreover, it can boost your upselling and cross-selling activities.

• Improved reliability

Product reliability is a crucial asset for customers. DevOps techniques at any stage of the product can guarantee a product’s proper and timely delivery, whether they are implemented at one of the numerous stages of a large project or within a small project development and deployment cycle. Proper and timely delivery are the critical factors of a reliable product and the main drivers of increased customer satisfaction.

DevOps and its impact on a business performance

The Google Cloud Platform & DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) study for 2021 highlights the difference between companies at various stages of DevOps adoption and outlines the direct correlation between excellence in software delivery and increased performance in a company’s technology modernizations. The Google Study classified teams as elite, high, medium or low performers based on 4 key software delivery performance metrics ( Deployment Frequency, Lead Time for Changes, Change Failure Rate, and Time to Restore Service). Similarly to previous years’ study findings, elite teams kept evolving in terms of software delivery pace. Thus the lead time for changes, i.e. the amount of time it takes a commit to get into production, was reduced from a maximum of 1 day to a maximum of 1-hour timeframe for such teams. Moreover, compared with low performers, elite performers have 6570x faster time-to-recover from incidents when failure does happen. These findings are another standing illustration of the vivid fact – companies with a high level of velocity and stability driven by thoroughly implemented DevOps practices are increasingly successful in terms of business performance and efficiency. More interesting findings of the research are depicted in the picture below:

The source: google.cloud.com

Conclusion

Catch yourself when you wonder, “How can I increase my business performance?”. And in case adopting DevOps is one of the things to do on your list, it’s time to make it a higher priority task. Multiple studies and use cases have long ago revealed the impressive impact of DevOps on companies, which means that adding this robust, cutting-edge methodology to your business strategy is the only right solution. At Kanda, we believe that maintaining continuous delivery is essential to stay ahead of the competition. Learn more about the wide range of DevOps services Kanda provides to the customers and talk to our experts to take your first confident steps towards software delivery excellence.