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Kishan Gohil provides some insights into how embracing DevOps could make your enterprise more cost-efficient.

Your enterprise is embracing the cloud. You’ve planned a strategy to ensure the cloud environment you’re building will perfectly fit your business goals. You’ve evaluated pricing models, compared DevOps costs and even implemented tools and analytics to help you avoid waste and optimize your cloud budget. But, unless your development and IT operations models can adapt and scale at the velocity of cloud computing, you’ll never experience the full benefits of your cloud transformation. 

Just as cloud-native applications were purposefully designed to take full advantage of the cloud’s near-limitless processing power, innovative technologies and massive scale, the DevOps methodology enables IT and development teams to build, deploy and collaborate in ways that suit modern cloud environments. 

DevOps is an approach to software delivery that brings together development and operations teams to speed software development, nurture innovation, improve application and infrastructure performance and embrace change. It breaks down traditional silos within the organization to create a more collaborative workplace culture and boost employee engagement. 

Along the way, it will also make your enterprise more cost-efficient. Here’s how.

DevOps teams work more quickly, resulting in faster delivery and reduced turnaround times

The old saying still holds true: time is money. Adopting the DevOps approach improves the organization’s overall rate of delivery, as well as individual employee productivity. Simply put, developers accomplish more with their time. They use automated tools, test often and early to catch errors faster and take advantage of pre-built templates and existing services.

Because development is speedier, the enterprise is better able to respond to changes in the marketplace or shifts in consumer demand. This enhances its ability to compete in today’s world at the same time that it increases the value each developer contributes.

Enterprises with mature DevOps practices experience higher employee satisfaction rates, decreasing long-term recruitment costs

Developers working in DevOps practices report feeling significantly happier in their jobs than those working in traditional IT environments. And, happier employees tend to be more engaged, more productive and more likely to stay in their jobs for longer.

More than two-thirds of enterprises have already implemented some tenets of the DevOps methodology, and the most talented job candidates often prefer these organizations over ones that continue to rely on legacy approaches. Considering the difficulties associated with finding and hiring scarce technical talent today, this represents a significant advantage for these employers.

What’s more, the cross-functional teams in DevOps organizations usually have stronger collaborative relationships – and far fewer conflicts – than traditional development and operations teams. Things tend to go smoothly in this kind of environment. When people work together closely, there’s greater overall investment in their shared responsibilities.

With DevOps, it’s easier – and thus cheaper – to manage software releases.

In legacy development organizations, managing complex software release cycles can quickly get expensive, especially in cases where the enterprise incurs downtime costs or when end user productivity is compromised. 

Instead, the DevOps approach calls for automated release pipelines, with much smaller code modules being released far more often. Because changes to the code base are small and iterative, they’re less likely to cause issues in the production environment. And, managing these minor changes requires far less labor.

It’s also common for DevOps teams to employ blue/green deployment strategies, in which changes are pushed out to half the production environment at a time. This makes it near-effortless to revert back to the older software version when that’s necessary, avoiding costly service interruptions.

DevOps organizations see fewer errors in production environments

Another core tenet of the DevOps philosophy is accountability and traceability. DevOps teams typically rely on automated performance monitoring tools to gather detailed information on how code changes impact the software’s behavior. This data is shared with team members whose involvement spans the whole of the development cycle.

This means that more people share greater visibility into the root causes of potential issues, making it easier to see — and fix — bugs and simpler to solve problems. According to industry reports, this makes mature DevOps practices more than 2,000 times faster at recovering from incidents than traditional teams, and their code changes are seven times less likely to fail. 

In addition, when the entire team shares responsibility for the stability of the infrastructure, both test and production environments tend to operate more reliably. 

There’s a focus on measurable impact and continuous improvement, so DevOps teams keep getting better and better

DevOps organizations measure and monitor the performance of their platforms, pipelines and infrastructures in order to assess their progress. This allows them to strive for real-world improvements, including in areas like efficiency and deployment speed that have a direct impact on the business’s bottom line.

Want to learn more about the benefits that DevOps can bring to your organization’s cloud transformation journey? Discover how our new DevOps-as-a-Service offering can accelerate your adoption of modern development practices.