According to Puppet’s 2020 State of DevOps report, which surveyed 2,400 IT professionals worldwide, 84% of the respondents reported that their organisation had adopted DevOps practices to some degree.

This means DevOps has been increasingly popular among modern-day businesses, making it an attractive approach for companies seeking to stay ahead of the competition and deliver value to their customers more quickly and efficiently.

What is DevOps?

As an IT personnel or software developer, you must have come across the word DevOps, read about it or even seen an article on it, and you’re wondering what exactly DevOps is.

DevOps is a software development procedure that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to organise and make the software development life cycle efficient and automate product delivery and infrastructure upgrades.

DevOps enables organisations to deliver software and services faster and reliably in a rapidly changing market, providing a competitive advantage in today’s fast-paced business environment. By breaking down the silos between the development and operations teams, DevOps encourages collaboration, communication, and a focus on continuous improvement.

DevOps can help businesses improve their efficiency, reduce costs and increase the quality of their products and services. By automating processes and incorporating feedback from users and stakeholders, DevOps can help identify and address issues more quickly, resulting in faster time-to-market and better customer outcomes.

In the traditional software development cycle, code changes are often developed and tested separately and then integrated into the codebase. This process can be time consuming, error–prone, and lead to delays in releasing new features and bug fixes. CI/CD seeks to address these challenges by automating the process of code integration, testing and deployment to merge and test changes as soon as possible.

Interesting, Bring it on.

What is CI/CD?

Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is a set of practices and tools that help software development teams automate and streamline the process of building, testing, and deploying code changes. Modern businesses are adopting CI/CD because it reduces the risk of bugs and automates the testing process.

Also, it catches errors early in the development cycle. Continuous integration automatically creates and tests code changes, while continuous delivery involves deploying those changes to production environments.

Organisations must set up the system to be adaptable enough to scale up resource usage when needed and down when the demand is lighter.

To adopt CI/CD into their business, organisations typically need to invest in the right tools and technologies, such as version control systems, continuous integration and deployment platforms, and testing frameworks.

They also need to implement best practices such as code reviews, automated testing, and constant monitoring to ensure the quality and stability of their software. Lastly, they need to build a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement in which developers and operations teams work together to optimise the software development and deployment process.

DevOps offers better flexibility and scalability by utilising cloud-based infrastructure and automation technologies to dynamically provide resources, scale up or down based on demand, and effectively respond to changing business requirements. As a result, businesses may produce software more rapidly, more consistently, and at a lesser cost, and they can also adjust rapidly to opportunities and challenges in the market.

This can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty while providing a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Additionally, DevOps emphasises the importance of feedback and customer involvement in the software development process, which can lead to a better understanding of customer needs and preferences, and ultimately result in better products and services.

By lowering the time and resources needed for software development, testing, and deployment, DevOps improves efficiency and results in cost savings. Organisations may discover and fix problems sooner by automating the software delivery process, leading to fewer defects and a quicker time to market.

Significant cost reductions, as well as an increase in sales and profitability, may result from this. DevOps also strongly emphasises using cloud-based infrastructure and automation technologies, which may create a more flexible and scalable environment and minimise the need for expensive hardware and infrastructure expenditures. DevOps may help businesses operate more efficiently and save money by enabling them to accomplish more with fewer resources.

In summary, leveraging DevOps can help businesses achieve faster software delivery, increased collaboration and communication, improved efficiency and productivity, and greater agility and responsiveness to changing market conditions. Ultimately, DevOps can lead to higher-quality software and enhanced customer satisfaction, making it an essential strategy for businesses looking to remain competitive and innovative.