DevOps: Challenges, Services, & Benefits

The Need

In todays’ rapidly evolving technological world, the latest among the buzzwords is DevOps (development and operations). DevOps is a thought process that creates an agile environment between development and IT operations. The aim of DevOps is to modify as well as enhance the relationship between development and operations by promoting better communication and collaboration between these two business units.

DevOps is not a program or a software. It is more a culture or rather a philosophy. Developers and system administrators do not always agree on a lot of things, but they do concur that customers on the business side often pull them in different directions. On one hand, business users’ demand change, as they need new features, new services, new revenue streams, as quickly as possible. On the other hand, they also require a system that is stable and free from outages. The challenge that most IT organizations face is that they feel like they have to choose between delivering changes quickly and dealing with an unstable production environment, or maintaining a stable, but stale environment. In either case, companies are unable to provide the best solutions to its customers.

To resolve the issue, DevOps was created by integrating business users, developers, test engineers, security engineers, system administrators into a single, highly computerized workflow. The goal being quick delivery of high-quality software that meets all user requirements while sustaining the reliability and solidity of the entire system.

The Challenges

Despite being created to resolve an ongoing problem, there are many challenges encountered when incorporating this “culture.” Some of them are:

• Lack of vision

Implementing DevOps needs people who have the knowledge, vision and experience. Training and guidance can make people realize the urgency on adopting DevOps.

• Collaboration

There is a need to bring about collaboration between teams, thus can attain productivity. Developers and Operations teams need to work together in constant collaboration. This will give rise to improved visibility, effortless tracking of changes, and amplified productivity.

• Integrating tools

Integration is considered as one of the main pillars for DevOps. Tools have to be integrated properly to make testing, deployment, and building all work together in a seamless form. The right arrangement options resolve the issue of tool integration. Umpteen tools are available in the market for providing an enterprise-level framework by systematizing the tool environments. These tools deliver substantial benefits like a cohesive framework as well as support for multiple varied features.

• Production downtime

Due to lack of improper deployment instructions / checklist

• Hacking

Fixing directly in production (instead of a proper hotfix process) and forgetting to check-in into source control

The other challenge remains that developers, as expected out of them, are willing to force out software faster and faster. Operations, on the other hand, realizes that quick fire changes without proper safeguards could destabilize the system. There needed a systematic approach to the problem.

The Offerings

Even though there are challenges in implementing DevOps, people are leaning towards it. The services offered are multiple.
DevOps facilitates collaboration between an organization’s software development team and the operations team. It gathers the dissimilar tools that cover various aspects of the overall process and connects these tools to work together as one unit. The specific goals of a DevOps approach can span the entire delivery pipeline. It comprises improved deployment frequency prompting to faster time-to-market, lower failure rate of new releases, shortened lead-time between fixes and faster mean time to recovery - in the event of a new release crashing or otherwise disabling the current system. DevOps focuses both the Apps team’s drive for agility responsiveness and the operations team’s concern with quality and stability on the ultimate goal of providing business value.

Using a DevOps approach can make simple processes gradually programmable and dynamic which in turn maximizes predictability, efficacy, security and maintainability of operational processes. Companies that use DevOps have the ability to deploy code up to 30% more frequently with 50% fewer failures compared to those peers, who still prefer to work “the old way”. They are able to leverage the overall quality of software development by 63% and improve the quality of produced code by 38%.

The Benefits

There are umpteen benefits of DevOps. Reliable sources report some pretty extraordinary benefits achieved with DevOps. A survey by Puppet Labs found that DevOps high performers release software 200 times more frequently than low performers, with 2,555 times faster lead times. The quality of the software products is higher, too, as shown by the finding that high performers have three times lower change failure rates than low performers. Finally, the net effect on system stability is highly positive: when the platform does go down, high performers restore service 24 times faster than low performers.

Some of technical benefits include:

• Stability

High-performing organizations spend 22% less time on unplanned work and rework. As a result, they are able to spend 29% more time on new work, such as new features or code.

• Security

High performers spent 50% less time remediating security issues than low performers.

• App deployment speed

High performers deployed multiple times per day, on demand, compared to low performers who deployed between once per month and every 6 months.

There are cultural benefits:

• More productive teams
• Advanced employee engagement
• Greater professional development openings

And there are business benefits:

• Faster delivery of features
• More stable operating environments
• Improved communication and collaboration
• More time to innovate (rather than fix/maintain)

To Conclude…

Nearly a decade into the great DevOps experiment, the data is clear: DevOps is here to stay—and for some very good reasons. Many thought it impossible, but DevOps has succeeded in integrating business users, developers, test engineers, security engineers, and system administrators into a single workflow focused on meeting customer requirements.