5 ways in which you can save costs using devops.

Does your company work mostly digital these days? Then we don’t have to explain to you that everything moves at the speed of light. For example:

• Your website is a living product that often needs new features to stay up to date and user-friendly.
• Your webshop has to meet the wishes of your clients and adapt to the feedback of your user research.
• You would prefer to launch your revolutionary app before the competition does it.

You already know that the development, release and maintenance of software takes quite some time and costs a lot of money.

Maybe this process has already gone wrong for you in the past? It’s not inconceivable: there’s a lot to think of! To make sure everything goes smoothly (or: is beneficial for your wallet), you should think about hiring a DevOps team.

What is DevOps, how will it save me time and cut down costs? Read on...

What is devops?

DevOps (development and operations) combines software development (Dev) with software operations (Ops). One of the most important principles of DevOps is the automation of processes. Furthermore, DevOps makes for a stronger collaboration between the development teams and the operations teams. No more downtime, more measurements and a higher customer satisfaction are some other advantages of a strong DevOps strategy.

That’s all well and good, but what about the costs of implementing this DevOps strategy? It’s true that there are some initial costs tied to this process. But once your DevOps team is up and running it will be a real cost saver, promise!

How? Automation, automation, automation. And 4 other ways… ;-)

The advantages of devops.

1. automation = speed & quality.

DevOps automates your processes. What does this mean exactly?

Automated processes are reliable, predictable and repeatable. First of, you’ll be able to get your product to market more quickly. Not only will you make profits faster, your product also has a bigger chance of being original. You still have a shot at reinventing the wheel.

Another advantage of automation: testing can be done automatically. This means fewer mistakes will be made. The quality of your product will improve. Since your processes are being executed by computers and not by people, you eliminate the possibility of human mistakes.

At the same time, you’re saving on the release costs of your product. After implementing your DevOps strategy, you will only need man-hours for maintenance and feature requests. Every other step (deploying, testing, creating URLs …) can be done automatically. What’s more, the entire deploy process can be done at night, making the impact on your business considerably smaller.

2. working more transparently.

After implementing your DevOps strategy, you will soon notice that the teams on your floor are working more closely together. You take an isolated operations team and an isolated development team and you melt them into one.

The biggest advantage of this improvement in communication is the acceleration of the problem solving process. Since every team member has the same information, they can collaborate on searching for solutions.

Without a good DevOps strategy, a colleague falling ill or someone leaving the company would mean that that person’s knowledge would be lost. But since every coworker now has the same information, their role can be passed on without a problem. To further enhance the transparency, DevOps teams often work in the cloud.

3. no more downtime.

The biggest nightmare of any IT’er? Downtime. The downtime of a website or an app brings more costs with it the longer it takes. You also risk your clients getting so frustrated by not having access to the application that they don’t want to work with your company anymore. 

A good DevOps strategy minimizes the duration of the downtime. Thanks to the automated testing, you can spot possible bugs more quickly and you can fix them before your system has to go into downtime.

Moreover, the application management aspect of DevOps allows you to implement continuous improvement of the production system.

4. keep on measuring.

The automation of your DevOps Strategy allows you to measure more. The results of these measurements can be used to improve your processes and increase your efficiency. The measurements also give you the chance to take on your bottlenecks more quickly.

What should I measure exactly? These 4 standards are without a doubt the most important:

• Deployment frequency
• Lead time for changes
• Change failure rate 
• Mean time to restore service

5. happy customers.

This last point is obvious. If you’re able to produce new features more quickly, at a better quality and with a lower risk of bugs, your customers will be happy. Admittedly, customer satisfaction is not exactly a way in which you save costs. But it does make sure that your business gets more profits.

You can also take this one step further (like we did) and offer DevOps As A Service (DAAS). DAAS entails that we offer DevOps services to clients that don’t have their own DevOps team. We can help these clients with migrations to the cloud, we give them advice on how to automate their corporate processes, or we can go over their monitoring needs (for example, infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring or logs monitoring).

We offer some collaboration tools to our clients as well. We help them to implement these tools into their workflow. Afterwards, we also offer support. Some examples of the tools we offer are:

• Jira
• Confluence
• Slack