Achieving an effective DevOps strategy is a triumph.
One of the principles of the DevOps methodology is that members of development teams and IT operations members regularly communicate with each other instead of remaining in siloed environments.
That characteristic helps drive efficiency between the groups. But, how does an excellent DevOps strategy save money?
Here are five ways:
1. It cuts down release costs
A successful DevOps strategy allows companies to release things faster while maintaining high-quality results. When (Hiscox deployed DevOps) as a way to respond to the need for an increased pace of change, it saved money through several benefits.
It slashed the release costs for one application by 97% and partially did so by automating parts of the process and becoming less reliant on human testers. Before automation, testing required the efforts of multiple parties across several days. But, automating made testing happen overnight and in a hands-free manner. Moreover, the time to release for that single application mentioned above decreased by 89% and the staff required to do it went down by three-quarters.
Being able to release software faster and with fewer people reduces costs. In this case, DevOps was the key to making it happen.
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2. It gives company teams greater insights into shared issues
The siloed structure mentioned earlier often causes team members to have difficulty understanding how the issues they help resolve have broader impacts on the company at large. But, when the development and operations teams communicate with each other often, there’s more visibility into how some problems affect more than one part of the company.
Then, the issues get resolved faster than before because multiple teams are on the same page regarding getting an issue fixed. Confused.com is a price comparison site that operates in the United Kingdom.
It used the New Relic platform for monitoring and found that the tool helped them stay in a DevOps mindset when looking at how their applications performed and taking care of any issues.
Confused.com usually releases new code into production (15 times per week). Before it used New Relic to give the operations and development teams access to performance data for the apps, it took days for people to diagnose what caused issues in its apps. Now, it’s possible to get to the heart of the problem in minutes.
This progress reportedly marks the first time in the history of the company when development teams looked at operations data and vice versa. They can also view comparative analyses of the success or failure of different deployments or respond faster when users report issues.
These perks mean that companies save money by getting alerted to issues faster and enabling multiple teams to receive identical access to the information they need to contribute to prompt resolutions.
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3. It could minimise downtime
Network downtime is often an IT leader’s worst nightmare due in part to the expenses it represents. In one survey of 200 companies, the statistics showed that downtime accounted for (more than $26.5 billion) in expenses. And, it’s easy to see how the costs of a network outage could rapidly stack up and amount to more than people expect or realise.
For example, when people can’t access a website or app, they get frustrated. Their displeasure may become so extensive that they stop doing business with a company and go somewhere else to meet their needs.
An effective DevOps strategy makes prolonged downtime less likely to happen. That’s partially because automated testing allows companies to more swiftly spot issues and fix them before they take systems down. Also, the application management aspect of DevOps leads to continuous optimisation of the production system, which also makes issues more apparent.
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4. DevOps helps requested changes happen faster
DevOps makes teams increasingly nimble when implementing changes to apps that their clients want. Before this methodology gained popularity, it was common to accumulate a list of desired changes asked for over the past weeks or months and plan them for a future release before the current release even goes live.
Nicole Forsgren, a leading DevOps researcher, found that high-performing organisations using DevOps (were twice as likely) as non-DevOps companies to surpass their profitability, market share and product goals.
One of the reasons those things are likely true is that DevOps allows faster innovation in response to market trends. Today’s consumers expect improvements to happen quickly, especially when they use mobile apps. If too much time passes between releases and exceptionally annoying issues persist, people could delete those apps in favor of ones that are more stable or user-friendly.
On the client side of things, the ability to meet change requests for app development customers faster than usual could shave expenses from the overall project budget and help companies get finished ahead of deadlines.
5. It reduces time-to-market delays
Similar to how it’s essential to roll out improvements as fast as possible, speed is a top concern when bringing a new product to the market. If companies wait too long to do it, enterprises with near-identical offerings will beat them and start enticing people to buy or use the competing item.
Since using DevOps effectively boosts efficiency, the likelihood becomes higher that businesses can be the first players in the market and cause others to play catch-up.
On the other hand, if companies waste too much time entering the market with new products, they won’t be able to capitalise on the momentum and “buzz” that typically accompany pioneering products and ideas.
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DevOps implementation is good for business
This list shows several of the many reasons why many tech leaders — as well as executives in non-tech sectors — conclude that DevOps makes sense for helping them achieve more organisational savings. Indeed, saving money often happens through unexpected but impactful ways.
