What Is DevOps And What Are Its Business Benefits

• By Eric Walter
• 19-10-2021
• DevOps

According to Stats, by 2025, the DevOps market is anticipated to hit $12.85 billion.

Recently, the demand for high-quality software and applications has increased tremendously, which has made agility and speedy development a priority in the world of development. In order to fulfill the requirements of customers, it is essential for service providers to deliver robust product features along with enhanced operationality of software applications.

Also, to stay ahead of the competition, they need to consistently access and upgrade their tools, value chain, existing delivery process, and more. Today, we will be talking all about DevOps and what benefits it provides to businesses.

Read on to learn everything there is to know about it.

Some Important DevOps Stats
According to stats, overall traditional Ops are 41% more time-consuming

With DevOps implementations,63% of organizations experience an improvement in their software deployment quality
Around 38% experience a higher quality of code production with DevOps tools and practices
With DevOps tools and practices, 64% of organizations deploy new software more frequently
Stats reveal that traditional Ops spends 21% more time dealing with problems and errors

What is DevOps?
DevOps refers to the process of improving work and quality throughout the lifecycle of software development. It aims to streamline the collaboration between Dev and Ops teams, helps reduce deployment time, and allows businesses to develop and deliver reliable apps quickly and effectively.

Jez Humble explains DevOps in simple words as,” DevOps is “a cross-disciplinary community of practice dedicated to the study of building, evolving and operating rapidly-changing resilient systems at scale.”

The DevOps lifecycle depends upon several tools and practices, which include:
1. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment and integration refer to the testing of all of the alterations done to the code as soon as possible. The aim of the two approaches is to integrate and deploy the code without delay which helps enhance the quality and frequency of the software delivery.

It shortens the development time dramatically; sometimes even weeks and months. With the help of quick application changes, the production environment is also reached much faster. Hence, this decreases the deployment time and speeds up the prototype development cycle.

2. Continuous Integration
Continuous integration is a primary DevOps practice and it involves the integration of code changes from different contributors into a single software project.

This allows developers to get quick and easy feedback on committing code; allowing them to fix any bugs within a short period of time. The primary goal of continuous integration is to reduce software development time and enhance its quality.

3. Continuous Delivery
Continuous delivery refers to an ongoing DevOps practice that allows the development, test, and deployment of code. This process automates the entire software release process and deploys the entire code into a production or testing environment following the build stage.

4. Continuous Deployment
Continuous deployment is the next stage of continuous delivery. There is no need for human intervention for the release of the code change deployed in the production stage to the customer. The deployment process will only be aborted due to the failed test, allowing for human intervention. It is possible to deploy the written codes in real-time through automation.

5. Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring refers to the process of continuous monitoring of the environment and the application during every stage of the DevOps pipeline. If there are any issues or bugs there are reported back to the development.

Key DevOps Tools
Though the success of DevOps relies heavily upon underlying culture, DevOps tools still hold a lot of significance. Let's have a look at a few of the popular tools used in the DevOps environment.

Source code repository: Cloud Force, Git, Subversion, TFS
Build server: SonarQube, Artifactory, Jenkins
Configuration management: Salt, Ansible, Puppet, Chef
Test automation: Water, Selenium
Virtual infrastructure: Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, VMware vCloud

What are the Benefits of DevOps for Organizations?
“Too often, these teams code themselves into a corner with mountains of proprietary scripts that actually add more waste to the system, instead of removing waste from the system, which is what the driving forces behind the DevOps movement are all about.”– Mike Kavis, Cloud Technology Partners.

Some of the major benefits of DevOps include:

Quick software deployment: DevOps enables businesses to develop and deliver new software quickly and efficiently through using the right methods.

Enhanced Agility: DevOps allows businesses to scale their operations and increase agility for improved overall outcomes.

Reduced Manual Efforts: Automation is essential for DevOps, It helps guarantee reduced labor cost, high-quality and reliable deployments, increased success rates, and quicker error recovery.

Minimal Defects: DevOps helps decrease the occurrences of bugs through continuous improvement in software delivery to develop successful solutions.

Enhanced Collaboration: DevOps fills in the gaps between the development team and the operations. This ensures robustness and effectiveness in the software development lifecycle.

Significant improvement in product quality: Collaboration between operation and the development teams, as well as getting feedback regularly helps enhance the quality of the product throughout the development phase.

Conclusion
If your business has not already adopted DevOps, then it's high time you consider adopting its practices. Regardless of what reasons are stopping you from implementing DevOps practices and tools and practices in your organization, the benefits of the technology are too big to be ignored. DevOps has undoubtedly become a prominent part of any cloud solution nowadays.