Why would your business benefit from DevOps?
Let’s have a look at the long-term benefits of relying on the DevOps methodology:
- Centralization of information / Unifying information
There is no risk of piles of information that are complex to break down and work on. These obstacles will no longer be an issue for the teams that work on the projects. No one denies the importance of separate teams and job titles. But, with DevOps, different professionals can collectively see the main goal they strive to achieve with group efforts and contributions.
- Quick updates and fast releases
The best way to stay relevant in the market is to follow the fast-paced dynamic of the industry and follow up with regular updates and quick releases of the products. With DevOps, it’s easier to meet the time-to-market as planned and keep the same pace as the competitors. Without any internal issues between different teams in the company and without unresolved loops in feedback, the work dynamic can propel fast forward with better outcomes.
- Continuous focus on the CI/CD
The CI/CD is, in a way, a backbone, a functional basis for DevOps. Through this, you’ll always achieve timely deployment, efficient code changing, and better testing and building of products.
When adopting DevOps in your business, you can expect to save money in the long run through faster tracking and overall better control of the release plan and timeline. And there will be no more bottlenecks to hinder your workflow.
- Automated processes and more efficient business operations
With all the benefits of DevOps, the business will start to flourish, and processes will become more efficient — faster work dynamic, automated processes, better product quality, and better deployment. One of the most prominent and best things with DevOps is the reduced risk of human error and improved team productivity.
When working with DevOps, teams become more productive, and different teams can now mutually be on the same page goal-wise. This removes the risk of a slow pipeline for the delivery of products.
The benefits of relying on DevOps are undeniable – traditional development of weeks or months is altered to just days or hours. It’s essential for any business to get to the results as efficiently and quickly as possible, as it’s the case with DevOps. And it has proven to be most beneficial in terms of innovative approaches and keeping up with speed, agility, and fast-paced global tech trends.
If we take this analysis a step further, DevOps is guaranteed to increase recovery by 24 times, deployment by 200 times faster, and decrease any fail rate significantly.
Consider the predictions and future of DevOps
If you need another proof that having a DevOps engineer is a must, consider what is predicted and expected for this job role and methodology in the future too. As technology progresses, this job role demand will certainly increase over time.
The major pillars to peak in popularity will be flawless security above all else, automation and scaling development, and efficient testing. A seasoned DevOps engineer is crucial to succeeding in all these aspects in the long run.
You might want to hop on the bandwagon of hiring DevOps professionals because the success of this software development methodology is about to continue rising steadily and surely. It’s even expected that by 2026, the market of DevOps will surpass $20 billion. How does this information relate to you? The popularity of this methodology will not stop, and these professionals will be in demand as automation and digitalization propel insanely fast forward.
How does it sound to adopt DevOps trends while they become even more popular? To peak into the near future of DevOps and utilize the new trends’ benefits of it? An excellent and curious DevOps expert will always be informed of the latest trends in this field and incorporate them into your business.
This methodology grows, improves itself, and becomes an even better corporate demand fit than ever before.
So, you need a DevOps professional if you’re also eager to introduce the following DevOps trends in your business:
Microservice architecture
There is a competitor to the monolithic IT architecture, and it’s the microservice architecture that will just become even more popular. It will also be significantly utilized because it creates segments from computer systems, is well organized, and can scale whenever needed. This type of architecture will peak in popularity because it will be the next big upgrade of SOA (service-oriented architecture). And if you haven’t known too well, SOA makes an app structure based on the app’s coupled services.
How does microservice architecture jump in here? It will catch and recognize any app issue when something in the app fails while the whole app still runs effectively.
When you combine microservice architecture and DevOps, you’ll get a fast and innovative collaboration of teams that work decentralized from each other. They will, in turn, gain much better control over the standards and tech stacks they use, and the tracking of performance metrics will improve too.
Also, they’ll be able to monitor their development processes and release cycles better, meaning there is saving time too. And saving time in this context means much shorter intervals for the software release.
Serverless computing
Due to high operational costs for server infrastructure, the other trend to expect is serverless architecture and computing for DevOps teams. Product development and deployment will become much more efficient when architecture becomes serverless because various errands will be easily identified through a pipeline architecture.
With serverless computing, DevOps processes and operations become streamlined, including everything from testing to maintenance, development, and deployment – the whole software lifecycle.
Another benefit is that the developers will have a reduced workload because serverless computing will take charge of system updates and server maintenance. Overall, this contributes to saving on costs by working much faster toward the results.
With a vast ongoing demand for many apps and new features, it’s justified that many choose low-code and no-code to keep up with the fast deployment pace. But, when you use DevOps along the low-code and no-code, you get an advantage in the competition.
When DevOps engineers and developers start using these platforms, they will smoothly work with any extensions and provide convenient, functional drag-and-drop elements quickly.
Every stage of the development gets simplified and well-supported with these low-code and no-code platforms – quality assurance, software design, code development, app ideating, documentation, analysis, and deployment.
GitOps and Kubernetes
How does GitOps play a role here? The framework utilizes all the DevOps best practices essential for app development (compliance, version control, CI/CD tooling, and collaboration). These practices are effectively applied to infrastructure automation respectively.
Now, Kubernetes represents a container orchestration platform used for manual process automation. These processes that get automated are the managing, deploying, and scaling of containerized applications.
Now let’s see the unifying the main points that connect to DevOps.
Kubernetes is becoming increasingly popular as an infrastructure trend for the operational side of processes. Its main benefit will be simplifying the local Kubernetes cluster starting on the developer's machine. Also, its security will reach an outstanding quality level through IaC (infrastructure-as-code) scanning.
Kubernetes and GitOps are connected in a way that GitOps is a Kubernetes-related type of infrastructure. Through GitOps, IT tech experts and developers can efficiently manage clusters through Git and provide secure and excellently functioning apps. With it, they can automate all updates, and the delivery will further enable the developers to test, deploy, and build software quicker and better than before.
AI & ML
The stages of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) can be even more improved, streamlined, and transformed with the help of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
How does this resonate in the context of DevOps? The DevOps teams can efficiently perform much better than before with the help of managing alerts and more intelligent, automated processes.
For example, predictive analytics is an advanced analysis method increasingly popular as markets and industries evolve. The DevOps pipeline can become more proactive with the help of AI, and it will be much easier to recognize issues and give good solutions. When you use AI and ML, you also give way to better data mining, modeling and statistics, and deep learning. All of this will bring your business to a whole new advanced level.
DevSecOps
With fast-progressing times, many industries and businesses opt for security automation in the processes of DevOps. What is expected to become more popular is the transition and blend of DevOps with and in DevSecOps.
How does DevSecOps resonate in this context? It is an app security practice (AppSec) that includes security in the early software stages during the overall SDLC. So, implementing this in the general workflow will result in better app security in the long run.
The developers that use DevSecOps will also do much better monitoring, remediating, and tracking security issues during the development. The outcome of this is outstanding quality and fast delivery.
What happens if you postpone the hiring of a DevOps engineer?
An even more important aspect is what would happen if you decide not to hire a DevOps engineer or a DevOps distributed team. You’ll understand why you need a DevOps professional if you also have a look at the following potential consequences that would happen from not relying on this methodology:
- Subpar work quality results and wasting of time
DevOps is essential for waste removal during work with new servers. Not only that, but it also wastes removing during the installation and configuration of software and finishing up deployments in various environments.
Without an automated process like with DevOps, the work is finished much slower; it is tested much later than it should, and with much more effort spent on it.
- Lack of predictability, good testability, and stability
Without DevOps, work can still get done, but in a more time-consuming and slightly less efficient way. So without this methodology, all internal teams concerned with a project won’t collaborate as they would while using DevOps. This reduces the chance for all of them to work together on the code overall – the testing, predictability, and stability.
- Lack of greatly-organized code inventory
Without DevOps, there will likely be loopholes in the overall documentation for the code, supporting software, and other specs for configuration.
- Lack of synchronicity between operations and development teams
Your internal work dynamic should include synchronicity between teams as a basis for a good work dynamic. So, without DevOps, the different teams of operations and development might see the bigger picture in slightly different directions than if they’d collaborate together more closely.
At the very least, they’d be motivated differently toward the mission that should ideally be one and mutual for them all.
- Technical workflow regress
Think of it as a blend of time-wasting and money-wasting. It doesn’t sound too good, does it?
A technical workflow regress is, in a way, similar to a debt that has to materialize yet. This makes sense if you consider the stagnation that results from workarounds, corrections, or unpredicted challenges down the road.
- Lack of protection for the most fragile systems
What needs the most security are the systems most prone to downtimes, crashes and errors. Usually, these systems are the ones that are the most significant part, the core of most tasks, and they always need a lot of fixes and changes.
Think into the future and try to conclude what stakeholders would think once a work dynamic is slowed down and when promises regarding deadlines aren’t met, or the quality of work is not delivered. This is a real risk if your teams have to continuously go back and fix things they didn’t anticipate or prepare for.
- Scalability and bad architecture
For example, a common mistake many startups make is thinking they don’t need DevOps. Then the business expands, and its infrastructure becomes challenging to manage, insecure, and not scalable. Then, when they do need to hire a DevOps engineer, they have to start everything from scratch, which becomes more costly.
For example, startups may have used AWS EC2 in the past for the deployment, but later, an issue stems from this is the scalability when they need to move to Kubernetes. At this point, the code is far from ready and finished, and a developer would need to fix the code and make it Kubernetes-ready. This could be easily solved with a DevOps professional.
Industries other than IT that rely on DevOps
The tech is, of course, the industry that most prominently utilizes DevOps, but there are other industries that need it as well:
- Finances, banking, and insurance
To remain competitive, many banking companies have started using DevOps in their technology processes and HR and compliance sectors. The DevOps methodology comes in very handy for banking solutions regarding customers’ demands. It also reduces turnaround time vastly.
When it comes to insurance, more often than not, there are opportunities or challenges in creating apps to cater to customers' needs. DevOps can also largely reduce user downtime (system unavailability).
In this line of business, keeping detailed track of inventory goes a long way, from arrival dates to packaging and shipping, all the way to stock numbers and product categories.
Healthcare has recently relied on big data regarding all sorts of advances for patients and healthcare providers. This includes EHR (electronic health records) and images for patients, among other things. In healthcare, a lot of sensitive data all around requires security features and compliance to be taken care of.
Many hospitality and tourism companies have relied on DevOps throughout recent years. In a time of digital presence for almost every aspect of life, hospitality doesn’t lack behind in this. Accommodation bookings and reservations are fully digital, as with anything else nowadays.
In healthcare and hospitality, there are many constraints for user data management, and this type of data is highly sensitive. This data is under HIPPA compliance, for which you have to ensure it is always secure and supported by the correct backup methods, so for this, it’s essential to have a DevOps engineer. The DevOps engineer will always ensure that this data is secure, safe, and protected and never gets lost or hacked.
Conclusion
Hiring a DevOps engineer will pay off majorly in the long run. Everything in the workflow will improve and become faster, more efficient, cost-effective, and more collaborative. When development processes become automated and more efficient, you’ll know that hiring a DevOps developer was the best decision you could’ve made.
Undoubtedly, a business can only benefit from having DevOps professionals because this methodology is incredibly proven and promising to bring even more advancements to development processes.
