The six key benefits of DevOps

DevOps enables teams to rapidly iterate, test, problem solve, and deliver quality builds consistently and with greater efficiency. This happens with a process of “continuous everything” through automation – development, integration, testing, deployment, monitoring, feedback, and operations.

The right tools are essential for improving workflows. Version control with branching allows everyone to contribute to the project, while making it easy to roll back to a previous build if something goes wrong. Automated error tracking gives teams the ability to detect and address errors before they make it to production, speeding up delivery. Build automations mean updates are verified and pushed live seamlessly.

Removing manual processes with DevOps tools gives the team back time to solve more complex issues and accelerate time to market.

The near-instant feedback provided by the DevOps lifecycle means teams can work with greater agility. In DevOps, feedback loops are embedded into your pipeline and crucial to the planning phase of each sprint.

This process protects the team from external challenges that could derail most projects. Bigger, unpredictable challenges will always occur over the course of the project – whether it’s market volatility, regulatory changes, or competitor activity. Any of these could delay a launch or halt the project altogether. In a DevOps process and culture, these challenges are expected and embedded in the day-to-day.

Being able to adjust your roadmap and respond quickly to factors that can send you off course is crucial to maintaining a competitive advantage, and DevOps gives you the flexibility to achieve that.

Your work culture is a direct result of the structures and processes you have in place.

The most significant innovation of DevOps over lean and agile methodologies is its ability to break down silos between separate departments – whether that’s Dev, Ops, QA, Security, or even data analysts or art and design teams. This is accomplished by creating cross-functional teams with diverse skill sets and shared goals.

One of the major benefits of DevOps is its focus on collaboration and a shared sense of accountability across teams. The process encourages a positive, open, transparent environment, setting organizational goals, and implementing unified tools and processes. When everyone is working toward the same goal – maximizing value to customers – it’s easier to make decisions, adapt to change, and work effectively as a team.

If it isn’t automated, it’s broken.

DevOps automation makes hours-long processes take seconds. This happens through Continuous Integration (CI), where work is delivered multiple times per day in small, frequent batches via automation.

This constant delivery stream results in faster feedback cycles. The more you’re deploying, the faster and easier it is to identify and fix issues – minimizing the bugs that halt production.

DevOps solutions like Automated Build tools or version control systems with automated merging remove the manual component of these processes. This frees up the team’s time to be proactive with new ideas rather than reactive to bugs. With tighter collaboration, shared goals, minimal manual processes, and faster feedback loops, teams are freer to experiment and address customer needs.

One of the core DevOps principles is to drive for continuous improvement by deploying early and often, then inserting feedback loops at every step of the DevOps lifecycle. This helps to optimize performance, reduce costs, and increase the speed of delivery.

A DevOps process reduces costs through minimized network downtime. Outages are costly, especially for projects at launch. With continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD) and automated testing, development teams will produce better performing code as bugs are identified and fixed early in the process.

DevOps and automation also help speed up release cycles, with multiple deployments a day that would traditionally need to be built manually. This allows even small teams to operate in AAA fashion, while minimizing expenses and complexity.

With both external and internal feedback loops in the DevOps pipeline, the core principles of DevOps revolve around being proactive – and the end result is a more customer-focused business.

The operational efficiency and faster delivery cycles DevOps provides has numerous benefits for the end user. The practice of small, frequent changes allows teams to not only catch bugs early and release stable products, but also to respond faster to customer requests or bugs they may still have missed.

Shorter feedback loops give you the flexibility to incorporate customer feedback into your plans more easily and ensure your product aligns with their wants and needs. You’re also able to release new builds and updates on a more consistent cadence to keep people coming back for more.