Full of business benefits, DevOps has now become the most practiced software development methodology. It has grown to be the cultural backbone of many organizations, from tech giants like Facebook to brands that seem to have nothing in common with tech, such as Walmart.
We cherry-picked a few cases to demonstrate the transformational power of this methodology and how it affects a business’s bottom line.
Test-driven development, automated testing, streamlined code review, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. These are some of the DevOps practices this leading healthcare technology partner implemented across dozens of applications and environments.
The stellar results did not take long:
- 67% drop in resource demand for successful product release
- 75% drop in hours needed to repair defects per environment, which improved their service availability
- 82% drop in app deployment time, which accelerated time to market
Amazon is one of the best-known DevOps pioneers. Their DevOps journey began when they moved from the monolithic architecture that hindered their growth to cloud computing. The transition to microservices was another important milestone in their DevOps adoption.
Fast-forward to nowadays: they use Git and GitHub for version control and AWS CodeDeploy and Apollo for improved code deployment. In addition to that, practices like configuration management and infrastructure-as-code help them identify bugs early and fix them before they do the damage.
The company doesn’t reveal its DevOps ROI. But according to their former lead engineer, its transition to agile DevOps helps the tech giant save millions of dollars.
Adobe provides a software suite consisting of multiple products—each with its own technicalities. The company’s development and operations teams had a hard time keeping such a diverse ecosystem up and running. To eliminate the problem, the tech behemoth decided to modify its software delivery process based on DevOps practices.
One of their first steps toward DevOps transformation was the adoption of CloudMunch. This platform allowed them to frictionlessly integrate different technologies into a single pipeline. It also provided visibility into all their deployment tasks, enabling them to see how every single change affected the entire ecosystem.
This move alone helped Adobe break organizational silos, accelerate software delivery, and meet 60% more app development demand.
Walmart’s technology arm is known for its DevOps projects. Hapi, a Node.js-based framework for writing reusable code, and Sauce Labs, the world’s largest continuous testing framework, are just two examples. The latter allowed Walmart Labs’ teams to save more than 750,000 person-hours that would have been spent on manual testing. Enhanced productivity, improved quality, and increased software delivery speed followed.
Up to 2013, the financial services giant struggled with slow, legacy ways of delivering software, which hindered its growth. Everything changed with the migration to CloudFoundry, a PaaS platform, followed by the introduction of the automation CI/CD pipelines and the mindset based on trust, shared responsibility, and continuous improvement in the software delivery process.
As early as in the first year of DevOps adoption, Fidelity International managed to speed up its deployment from three days to two hours and save $2 million over manual deployments.
As the success stories demonstrate, the potential of DevOps is immense. At the same time, these results become a reality only with the proper implementation of DevOps. What does it imply?
Well, organizational silos are the number-one hurdle to fast value creation, so their elimination is your primary task. You must bridge the gap between the development and operations teams, introducing lines of business into the process. Let’s see why it’s so critical for the high ROI of your DevOps initiative.