Implementing a DevOps approach brings a wide range of benefits that can transform an organisation's ability to deliver software and improve overall business performance.
These benefits extend beyond just technology and impact culture, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Skilling your team through DevOps courses ensures they know how to derive greater value from the DevOps strategy and implementation.
Key benefits of DevOps implementation
Implementing DevOps delivers significant benefits to modern software development by accelerating delivery, improving collaboration, and enhancing reliability.
1. Faster and More Frequent Software Delivery
Accelerated Time to Market: By automating and streamlining the software development lifecycle (SDLC), DevOps enables teams to release new features, updates, and bug fixes more quickly and frequently. This allows companies to respond to customer needs and market changes more quickly, giving them a competitive edge.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD): The core practices of DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, automate the process of building, testing, and deploying code. This reduces the time and effort required for each release, making frequent, small updates the norm instead of large, risky ones.
2. Improved Collaboration and Communication
Breaking Down Silos: DevOps is fundamentally a cultural shift. It breaks down the traditional barriers and communication gaps between development and operations teams. When these teams work together towards a shared goal, they gain a better understanding of each other's challenges and priorities.
Shared Responsibility: A DevOps culture fosters a sense of shared ownership across the entire product lifecycle, from development through production and maintenance. This reduces the "blame game" and fosters a more collaborative and positive work environment.
Faster Feedback Loops: Continuous feedback is a hallmark of DevOps. Developers get immediate feedback on their code's performance and stability in production, enabling them to proactively fix issues and learn from their mistakes.
3. Increased Reliability and Quality
Early Bug Detection: With automated testing integrated into the CI/CD pipeline, bugs and errors are caught earlier in the development process, when they are easier and less expensive to fix.
Consistent Environments: Using practices such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC), DevOps ensures that development, testing, and production environments remain consistent. This reduces the risk of "it worked on my machine" issues and leads to more reliable deployments.
Quicker Incident Resolution: When an issue occurs, the collaborative, data-driven nature of DevOps enables teams to quickly identify the root cause and resolve it, minimising downtime and its impact on the business.
4. Enhanced Security
"Shift Left" Security: By integrating security practices into the early stages of the SDLC, a DevOps approach (often called DevSecOps) makes security a shared responsibility. Automated security checks and vulnerability scans are built into the pipeline, helping identify and proactively address security risks.
Automated Compliance: IaC and other automation tools can enforce compliance policies, ensuring that infrastructure and applications adhere to security standards without manual oversight.
5. Greater Scalability and Cost Reduction
Automation: Through a proper DevOps implementation, you can automate repetitive, manual tasks. So, teams can focus on more strategic, valuable work. This increases productivity and efficiency, thereby improving resource utilisation.
Scalable Infrastructure: DevOps practices, particularly those related to cloud computing and containerisation, enable organisations to scale their infrastructure up or down to meet demand, leading to significant cost savings.
What are the drawbacks to implementing DevOps?
There’s always 2 sides to a coin! Let’s look at potential challenges and why this approach may not be right for your organisation. In another blog post, we dive into DevOps challenges.
Cultural Resistance: This is often the biggest hurdle to DevOps implementation. People may be comfortable with their existing workflows and roles. Convincing them to adopt a new, more collaborative mindset can be difficult and time-consuming. DevOps courses focused on foundations and leadership can equip your team with the knowledge to encourage cultural change.
Initial Cost and Complexity: The initial investment in new tools, training, and infrastructure can be significant. The process of integrating different tools and processes can also be complex.
Skill Gaps: Existing staff may lack the necessary skills in automation, scripting, and cloud technologies. Organisations will need to invest heavily in DevOps training or hire new DevOps-certified talent.
Security Concerns: While DevSecOps enhances security, the rapid pace of change in a DevOps environment can introduce new risks if security measures are not properly automated and monitored.
Part of setting up for success is anticipating these challenges and clarifying common misconceptions about DevOps implementation strategy.
The need for team structure and DevOps courses
To implement DevOps, you need to skill and structure your team well. Through DevOps courses, you can learn to adopt the approach properly.
Lumify Work is proud to be ANZ's only Platinum Partner of PeopleCert, owners of the DevOps Institute (DOI). We are an Accredited Training Organisation for PeopleCert's DevOps courses and certifications. Courses are also available in the Philippines.
The DevOps Institute is a global learning community empowering people who power IT. Their goal is to help you develop both the professional and personal expertise to succeed in DevOps strategy and implementation.
Consider enterprise-level DevOps certification courses and certifications such as DevOps Foundation (DOFD), DevOps Leader (DOL) and DevSecOps Foundation (DSOF).
