Understanding the DevOps Hype

May 31, 2024 Roberto Magalhães

Decode the DevOps hype. Discover its impact, advantages and revolutionary approach to software development.

Whenever software development comes up in a conversation between people who know the process, DevOps is often the next topic of discussion. Since 2009 , DevOps has become the preferred software development methodology for industry professionals. Stated as simply as possible, DevOps is nothing more than a set of processes that help coordinate and unify development teams and their own processes to complement software development itself.

Its popularity and “hype” stem from the fact that it allows businesses and companies to create and improve products at a much faster rate than the more traditional software development methods of the past, such as the Waterfall method. While this sounds simple, many organizations hire experts specifically in DevOps or engage third-party DevOps consulting services.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the union of development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. This organizational approach not only makes it easier to develop software products and applications at a faster pace, but it also makes it easier to maintain any existing deployments.

By creating strong ties, better communication, and better overall teamwork between developers, operational professionals, and other key stakeholders, DevOps promotes shorter, more controlled software development lifecycle interactions. This is also achieved through the inclusion of industry best practices, new tools and automation.

DevOps was born from the fusion of the agile development movement and lean manufacturing principles. Agile prioritizes short sprints of work with rapid feedback iterations to create a much more responsive development process. Lean helps minimize waste during development and maximizes productivity. Through this process, constant planning, testing, and integration are at the forefront throughout the project to help ensure faster delivery of a high-quality product for release.

This methodology works in the construction, validation and deployment phases, with a focus on standardizing development and increasing automation. This improves product predictability, maintainability, team efficiency and safety.

What's unique about DevOps is that almost every company adjusts the process to meet their specific requirements or needs, so no two “DevOps” procedures will ever be completely the same.

Why is DevOps important?

From banking and entertainment to factories and healthcare, the Internet and software have completely transformed the way the world and its industries work. Software no longer acts just as a support tool for companies. Instead, it is an integral component of the daily tasks and inner workings of most companies.

DevOps emphasizes communication and collaboration between cross-functional teams to help build better products. DevOps focuses on resolving all issues quickly and everything related to a project is visible to all team members involved. This process equalizes ultimate responsibility for a final product and increases the overall quality of the product through informed and timely feedback.

This means that businesses that rely on these vital software programs can rest easy knowing they received the best product possible.

Reasons for the Hype: The Benefits of DevOps

DevOps continues to be the favorite development methodology – and with good reason. Below are some of the reasons why the software and applications industry has been so quick to adopt DevOps principles:

Faster innovation with shorter development cycles

When development and operations teams work as completely separate entities, it's difficult to tell if and when an application or product is ready for operations or deployment. Additionally, when development teams finish their tasks and simply deliver the product, the operations team struggles and needs to extend deadlines to complete their part of the process.

By combining the operational and development aspects of development in the DevOps methodology, software and applications are ready for use much faster than they would be with other methodologies. As companies succeed based on their ability to innovate at a better, faster and more productive pace than the competition, this reduced and improved collaborative process helps companies stay ahead.

Reduced failure rates and more recovery time

Programming defects are some of the biggest reasons teams experience deployment failures. With DevOps, development cycles are shorter and promote more frequent code releases. This helps make it easier for quality assurance and testing professionals to detect issues and bugs in the code.

By working in the DevOps methodology, teams reduce the number of deployment failures using agile programming practices based on collaboration and modular programming. When defects and problems arise, it is much easier to go through the rollback process as only a few modules will be affected.

Recovery time is an important, yet often overlooked, requirement of any type of development, as failure (at least to some extent) happens regardless of how good a team or methodology is. Recovery from this failure is much faster when all teams involved work together to fix things.

Improved Communication

DevOps does more than just improve the software product. It also strengthens teams, improving the software development process itself. Combined teams are much more productive and typically happier. Instead of individual goals, overall performance becomes the focus of a DevOps-driven development project.

When teams work closely and trust each other, they innovate and experiment more effectively, better solving problems and coming up with new ideas. Teams also never experience downtime while waiting for another department to complete tasks.

More efficiency and better security

DevOps also uses automation to ensure compliance throughout the development process, which means better overall product security. This is possible thanks to practices like policies and infrastructure as code. These policies allow companies to define what “compliance” means on a very broad scale, while being monitored automatically.

DevOps enables acceleration tools as yet another opportunity to increase efficiency. Scalable infrastructures like cloud-based platforms give teams more access to hardware resources, meaning testing and deployment operations happen at a much faster pace.

All aboard!

Using DevOps practices brings many benefits to organizations. Companies eagerly take advantage of faster application delivery, improved innovation, and performance-focused employee teams with this methodology. While DevOps continues to evolve and change alongside technology, organizations will continue to benefit from the continuous, communication-driven environment of this methodology.

If you liked this, be sure to check out our other DevOps articles.