Four Signs Your Company Needs DevOps

Featured article by Joshua Margolin, Principal Analyst at Clutch

If there is one thing that is consistent about the technology industry, it’s that there is no shortage of buzzwords that get thrown around.

It’s likely that you heard the term DevOps, and you may have thought it, too, is just another buzzword that people use to sound cutting-edge. Perhaps you’ve heard it and have a different opinion, though. You may be wondering, why, if so many people in tech are talking about this, is my company not adopting DevOps? How can my company benefit from DevOps?

DevOps – What is it?

DevOps, a mashup of development and operations, is used to describe a cultural change within an organization that aims to help increase collaboration among the various teams involved in software delivery: developers, operations, quality assurance, and management. Born out of agile software development, DevOps is often put in place for the purpose of releasing applications and features faster and more frequently. From this improved deployment frequency there are expectations of a faster time to market, lower failure rate of new releases, reduced time between fixes, and faster recovery in the event of a new release crashing or causing disruptions in the current system.

Rackspace put together a great explainer video that goes into more detail about DevOps. This article outlines four factors to consider when thinking about whether your company could benefit from a DevOps culture.

1.) Your IT Teams Operate in “Silos”

In companies that take a more linear approach to development, tasks are completed by one team and then passed along to another in a traditional handoff. For example, developers work on writing code and then pass it along to the operations team. If the development environment differs from the production environment, then that code needs to be worked on some more before it can be properly deployed. All the while, the business side of the house is anxiously awaiting the release of the new product, feature, or fix. In this scenario, everyone is operating within his or her own silo.

In a DevOps culture, teams work in similar environments and track work in the same system. If constructed properly, the roles of developers and operations engineers are intertwined, so problems aren’t handed off from one team to another. The teams work together rather than against each other, leading to greater collaboration and alignment toward business goals.

2.) You Need Scalability

One of the biggest impediments to growth is scalability. If your infrastructure cannot handle the demands of new products, features, and increased user interaction, then its performance will suffer noticeably. You need to scale your infrastructure to meet those increasing demands, but it takes time to spin up a new server or cluster, and time is precious when you need to scale quickly.

One of the core principles of a DevOps culture is automation. Tools like Puppet and Chef help automate configurations and provisioning by treating infrastructure like code. With this mindset, processes, traditional servers, and virtual servers can be configured through machines that are capable of processing definition files that mimic tested results, instead of relying on a manual configuration process. Automation not only is quicker but also less error prone.

3.) You Need to Deploy Faster

In the first example, where we talked about teams working in silos, there was the situation of a developer writing code and handing it off to the operations team. In this case, the next step would be the ops team revising the code so it will work in the production environment. It could take days or weeks until that new code – be it a new feature or bug fix – makes its way into the product.

With the DevOps approach, companies deploy code about 30 times more frequently, with 50 percent fewer failures. This benefit comes from increasing the automation in the organization. When processes are ramped up more quickly and the time previously spent on manual processes is directed toware=d other tasks, your code can make its way out the door more quickly.

4.) You Are Not Responding to Customer Demands & The Changing Market Quickly Enough

“When someone asks the question ‘Why DevOps?’ the right answer is velocity. Companies, especially enterprises, take on the changes that come with a DevOps mindset only because they have to increase the speed by which they bring technology to their market. If they don’t, someone else will, and they will become The Disrupted,” says Abbas Haider Ali, CTO of xMatters. “Speed equals survival and DevOps is one of the key bits of the training regimen.”

End-users are the main drivers of new features and products, so you need to take their demands seriously to prevent them from shifting their loyalty to one of your competitors.

The marketplace also contributes to the success of your product. As cultures, societies, technologies, and other circumstances change, your product needs to do the same in order to stay relevant. DevOps addresses this by making it easier to push small, frequent iterations that are easily deployed into the marketplace.

The Takeaway

Again, if return to our example of the poor developer who has to hand off code to the operations team and wait for its deployment, we see where things can easily get held up. That developer is sitting idle, waiting for the code’s deployment. Add the fact that Quality Assurance needs to test the code, all the while in their own silo, too, and you can easily see where time is wasted waiting for others to get their work done.

When those silos are broken and teams are working as a collaborative unit to meet business goals, there is less opportunity for wasted time and more opportunity to convey meaningful feedback. Add automation to the mix and there is less likelihood for errors. And, key resources are freed-up to divert focus to more pressing matters.

DevOps is more than a buzzword used on resumes and at conferences. It offers real promise to a number of different types of companies. Yet, like everything else, the move to a DevOps culture requires careful implementation. You need to assess where your company is and where you want it to go. You need to talk to your team to get buy-in, and most important, you need to plan how you are going to roll out each step.

Joshua Margolin is a Principal Analyst at Clutch, and is responsible for research related to software and web development. Clutch is a ratings and reviews site dedicated to helping users find qualified providers of technology services and solutions.