Is DevOps worth the investment?

Portions of this post were originally posted on the Puppet blog, and are republished here with Puppet’s permission.

Over the past several years the DevOps movement has really begun to take shape. It’s a movement of IT leaders that want change – to constantly deliver awesome software to their customers and do it with confidence.

To remain competitive, you’ve got to provide great software. That means simultaneously responding more quickly to business needs while also providing stable, secure and predictable services. That can be tough in a state of ongoing, relentless change.

DevOps helps you solve both today’s problems and prepare to face tomorrow’s problems. It’s about continual learning and improvement rather than an end state. If you’re already convinced and need practical tips on where to start, download our ebook on Getting Started with DevOps.

“Doing the DevOps” solves all the problems

You can’t just say “We’re going to do DevOps now” and expect everyone to drop everything and jump on board. DevOps requires some really big changes across the organization. Changes that impact culture, process and people.

• Culture: At the organizational level, the desired outcomes are really to create a culture of high trust with high performing, cross-functional teams that are all aligned around the common business goals.

• Process: A lot of processes have to change, moving from a more manual and siloed way of working to adopting automation and learning how to collaborate with each other. These practice changes can lead to shorter cycle times, higher productivity and greater visibility. (Really! We have research to prove this. See our annual State of DevOps Report.)

• People: We also don’t want to forget the human cost of all this. There is a very competitive market for tech talent and the best talent isn’t going to stick around burnt out and unable to expand their skills. How do you retain the best people so they don’t take their skills to your competition?

Why DevOps matters

We hear stories from Puppet customers all the time about how DevOps is transforming not just their business, but also their lives.

• High-performing IT organizations deploy 200 times more frequently than low performers, with 2,555 times faster lead time.

• They have 24 times faster recovery times and three times lower change failure rates.

• High-performing IT teams spend 50 percent less time remediating security issues.

• And they spend 22 percent less time on unplanned work and rework.

You can read more in our State of DevOps Report, and get inspiration for launching DevOps in your own workplace.

Laying the foundation for DevOps

DevOps isn’t easy, and every company’s journey is different. If this sounds like the kind of thing you already do, or like the kind of thing you want to do, there are plenty of resources available to help. We created the Getting Started with DevOps ebook to help your team lay the foundation for DevOps, successfully break down silos, and adopt cross-functional processes and methodologies that support a DevOps culture.

Finally, since automation is the foundation for many DevOps practices – helping you move faster without sacrificing stability or security — see how you can take advantage of automation with Puppet Enterprise, the leading platform for delivering, operating and securing your infrastructure.