What is DevOps?

While most companies have gained considerable experience in Agile development and are experimenting with or fully investing in DevOps principles, some believe that DevOps isn’t ready for prime time in larger organisations. This belief stems from a number of factors, including the requirement that adopting DevOps can require major changes in organising people, processes and technology. The other factor is that almost all large enterprises are subject to a wide range of regulations, especially when systems touch financials, personally identifiable information (PII) or healthcare data. The regulatory environment for large organisations is why they have strong controls in IT operations for releasing application updates. These controls are ripe for automation, as they have been based on manual processes.

As DevOps implementations continue, and as experience and automation grow, DevOps will be used more often for addressing real-world issues and business problems. And when people see how they can balance speed and agility with regulation and control, they’ll be more than ready to create truly new software functionality. Successful DevOps practices rely on a core appreciation of this reality and can make people more productive, because the “plan, build, run” systems operate more efficiently. 

You can spread DevOps methodology across your organisation intelligently, taking the risk out of working quickly, and minimising friction between IT operations and development teams. Large enterprises that rely on strong controls for business continuity can leverage emerging technologies such as value stream management (VSM) to help them make the transition.

There is an obvious business case for DevOps, but rolling it out may be a leadership challenge you didn't expect. It takes good preparation and persistence for companies to go from waterfall to Agile software development and on to adopting DevOps. However, the rewards can be impressive.

Stability

Many DevOps best practices help improve stability. One example is the focus on making smaller changes that are unlikely to cause major outages; they can be quickly and often automatically reverted if something goes wrong. The continuous integration process of DevOps helps to ensure that code changes are appropriately combined and tested, and the application of policies and tools can eliminate issues as early in the cycle as possible.

Security

The 2019 Puppet State of DevOps report shows that a strong DevOps foundation makes security simpler and more reliable to implement. Security becomes a part of the DevOps team in the same way as code development, testing and operations. Collaboration improves, and security is inherent in the process.

Speed

Working in smaller iterations and in combined end-to-end teams means that changes can be implemented more quickly, and the teams become more responsive to the needs of the business. The overall time from the initial idea through to the change appearing in production can be significantly shortened, meaning a faster time to value.

Collaboration

The benefits of DevOps are all heightened by improved collaboration and communication. Developers get direct feedback on the performance of their work in production, and operators have more insight into what is being delivered and why. All those involved, including security and quality assurance, have the opportunity to share and refine their policies through the support of the entire team.

It isn’t easy getting developers and operations teams to work together, to quickly build and to release code into production. DevOps is heavily reliant on cultural and process changes, along with the availability of the right DevOps tools. Many IT, engineering and business unit leaders at large organisations understandably get anxious when planning for such a transition. However, the business case for DevOps is compelling, and products like ServiceNow DevOps simplify the workflow. There’s simply no reason for any organisation to shy away from a DevOps deployment.