DevOps gives you wings

DevOps should be seen as a ‘capability’ within your organization, but for some it can be seen as an overhead. If IT is a main part of your company’s value creation process, or the primary means of customer acquisition, then DevOps should be seen as a capability.

These days IT is present in nearly everything we deliver as a business, so all the processes that exist between the developer and the live system - development to operations, or DevOps - have great significance to the customer experience. So it stands to reason that better DevOps will impact competitive success.

That is generally why our customers are looking for automation. If you don’t believe them you should take a look at what Puppet Labs are saying in their ‘2016 State of DevOps Report’. In their 5th annual study since 2011, they interviewed 4,600 professionals around the world to understand what level of DevOps they were all doing and how it was affecting their organizations' performance. DevOps is defined as a set of principles and process management practices that aim to make software building, testing & release management fast and reliable, and the report overwhelmingly concludes that when they are performed well they can give your company a competitive edge.

A big surprise for me was how much the high performing organizations (with well tuned DevOps practices) were outperforming their non-high performing peers, in terms of agility and reliability.

This is the difference of course in delivering new features into production several times a day, versus weekly, monthly or even quarterly, and making sure you don’t go straight into recovery mode when you do. In addition, the high-performers spend 50% less time remediating security issues, and 22% less time on unplanned work and rework (read this DevOps White Paper for more on the ‘3 types of work’ that impact business value).

DevOps in control. 100% consistency achieved.

Here at Platform.sh, we looked at how we might introduce step change improvement to the DevOps process by further automating a cluster of key processes that maintain consistency between environments.

And we are seeing tremendous results with many hundreds of our customers citing huge productivity and performance improvements. With better DevOps, they have seen significant positive effects on their IT capability, which in turn has enabled them to improve the way they think about and deliver their offerings. And through faster delivery of value to their customers at a much lower cost, they are now gaining a competitive advantage on a daily basis.

You may be asking yourself how we achieve this?

Firstly, our snapshot technology creates identical copies of running sites in seconds, keeping the code, files, services and data in lockstep for perfect consistency. This means that development teams can create & test every change or new feature in its own exact copy of the staging environment, as well as manage the test data. Consequently everybody now knows with certainty that it will behave exactly as expected in production.

Our approach elevates confidence and certainty in the workflow to the point where the number of changes going into the process begins to increase exponentially - regardless of priority or complexity - and appear in production a very short time later, working perfectly.

So in summary, better DevOps can make your organization a high flyer, but it’s actually Platform.sh that gives you wings!

For a longer more detailed read, see my White Paper, ‘Who needs DevOps? Some of us actually…’.