According to recent research, DevOps enables IT organisations to deploy new services 30 times more frequently, with 60 times fewer failures – which is particular beneficial as consumer expectations for digital services sky rockets. Furthermore, businesses that take advantage of Devops are 2 ½ times more likely to exceed profitability and productivity goals. It’s unsurprising therefore that every man and his dog, from start-ups to mega corporations, are looking to implement DevOps to protect the user experience and boost revenues.
As start-ups are much leaner than the majority of their competition, these businesses find it much easier to adopt and implement agile delivery methods. However, even the big multinationals have adopted DevOps with phenomenal results. Amazon, for example, deploys an application update every 11.6 seconds, which equates to a staggering 23,000 deployments each day, and has experienced 75% fewer outages since 2006. Yet with any major IT change, moving to DevOps doesn’t just happen, it takes work and the ability to adapt.
In Good company
Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix and even the UK government have embraced the power of DevOps. They’re aware that today’s marketplace is driven by ever-increasing demands for features, speed, and reliability, so they must continuously deliver new value without disruption to their customers’ experiences.
How do they achieve this with boundless confidence in their digital performance? They attain this by maintaining DevOps at the very heart of their performance execution. It fosters a system-oriented perspective from all stakeholders and ensures that testing doesn’t occur too late in the development lifecycle to add its greatest potential value. If you do not integrate an automated testing discipline throughout the development lifecycle, testing teams will have to repeat manual testing every time a code or configuration change is made, and problems will be found too late to implement fundamental changes.
If teams are not working toward the same goals and being measured against these benchmarks, they will operate independently of each other. If expectations and toolsets are not aligned, when there is a problem, the investigation revolves around guesswork and finger-pointing – rather than finding a solution.
Another common challenge that DevOps resolves occurs when IT operations report an obscure log message from the production environment, which developers can’t fix it because they are missing vital contextual information. With a unified view of performance data across teams, DevOps gives employees a unified comprehensive perspective that translates into an overall competitive advantage.
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Reinforcing DevOps
A survey of 1,400 companies ranked performance monitoring and performance testing as critical for DevOps. This is because organisations need constant visibility into everything taking place in the development lifecycle and production environment.
In pursuit of uninhabited growth and advancing digital performance, there are several tools available to make DevOps a natural part of application development. They foster collaboration among product management, development, IT operations, and technical support teams, allowing them to build more quality into their products and support the establishment of better feedback loops.
With visibility into the digital performance of applications throughout every step of the development lifecycle, businesses can accelerate collaboration between development and operations. This is because it enables and encourages each team to consider the same performance metrics from early on in the development lifecycle.
Performance monitoring shouldn’t start in production. Tracking performance of automated tests, together with analytics to identify outliers, keeps performance problems from making their way further along the development lifecycle.
Destination DevOps
DevOps can deliver outstanding digital performance to your customers and significant business results to your company. Wherever you are in your journey, I encourage you to keep moving forward.
