The future of DevOps productivity

Adopting DevOps has proven to be a powerful way for many enterprises to boost productivity, efficiency and profits. Countless studies have found that those firms who embrace the DevOps approach can expect to gain a range of positive business benefits, with a CA Technologies report showing that not only did DevOps result in a 51% increase in employee productivity, but DevOps firms also saw a 38% increase in growth originating from new revenue sources.

While DevOps can manifest in different ways depending on the company structure and goals, continuous delivery is a key hallmark of this method. When the array of practices, tools and philosophies that make up DevOps are brought together, the ability of businesses to rapidly deliver applications and services can be increased significantly.

AI enhancing productivity

Speeding up development time is a clear benefit of DevOps for businesses, with task automation playing a major role in supporting developers. For example, quality assurance (QA) tests may be an essential responsibility of the IT team that helps ensure products are released without errors, but they have traditionally been a repetitive, manual process.

By automating most of the testing, developers can focus on the more complex tasks that require an experienced set of hands. Deployments, too, can be automated to save time and reduce the chance of coding failures.

Facebook created a tool called Getafix that is able to automatically find bug fixes and ask engineers to approve these corrections, making the testing process far more efficient. There’s no question that DevOps engineers have a challenging job monitoring these environments in real-time. Yet, at the same time, new flaws and threats can appear at any moment and need to be addressed as soon as possible.

During days when many alerts of varying levels of importance are reported to engineers, using AI tools to automatically rank the urgency of these reports is vital. Based on facts including the alert source and similarity with previous issues, teams can react quickly to the most urgent threats. Scaleability, too, is also beneficial for engineers who want to unlock the most benefits from DevOps.

The value of real-time responses to DevOps challenges shouldn’t be understated, with even a relatively small delay having potentially widespread negative impacts. Cloud-computing can be a useful tool to remove latency problems and offers a powerful platform for deployment and testing, which provides teams with an edge.

Major impact

The differences in productivity between firms that are high DevOps performers and those that are poor performers is stark. A study by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) and Google Cloud, discovered that performers in the elite category have 46 times more frequent code deployments and 2,555 times faster lead time from commitment to deploy, than lower performers.

Another interesting finding from the study was the outsized impact cloud adoption has on the success of DevOps deployment. According to the report, teams that use all of the benefits of the cloud are 23x more likely to be rank as elite DevOps performers. While there may not be a single approach that ensures productivity is pushed to the maximum with DevOps, it’s clear that enterprises that don’t make the most out of AI and cloud solutions will face an uphill battle to make their operations more productive.

A DevOps approach requires far closer collaboration between staff compared to other methods. Unlike siloed environments, DevOps engineers are encouraged to share insights across teams and use their expertise where it is needed most. This cross-functional teamwork can make working together more efficient and productive.

Thanks to the ability of AI to process extremely large amounts of data, which humans are simply not able to understand, further expanding the use of AI-based solutions in the DevOps environment is the logical next step to boost productivity

DevOps Live will take place on 2-3rd of March at ExCeL London. Register for your free pass HERE.