You cannot think of DevOps as a technology. Rather, it is a shift of methodologies. It is an approach to software development that many software developing companies use. In organizations a few decades ago, the development and operations departments were separate. The development team was responsible for designing the system, developing it and testing it before delivering it to the operations department. Then, the operations department used the system to identify errors and report them back to the development department. 

But, in DevOps methodology, these two departments work together. This is why it is called DevOps, where Dev stands for Development and Ops for Operations. Nowadays, many organizations are learning to shift their systems to digital. The initial impact of DevOps will be visible in the workforce that uses different tools. In turn, it will make sure of high product quality, continuous deployment, frequent product release and reduced development time. Before exploring the DevOps pros and cons, it is better first to gain a basic understanding of DevOps:

DevOps – The Meaning:

In reality, there is no clear set of answers to the question of what DevOps means. However, it is denoted as a set of approaches to automate and facilitate the software development process between the development and other members of the team. This approach is being used by organizations for building, testing and releasing codes not only quickly but also dependably.

The thing to remember here is that DevOps is more than just a development approach. It is an entire culture. It brings together continuous delivery, agility and automation so that it will be possible to deliver apps of higher value to customers. However, many organization is not able to see the difference between DevOps and Agile approaches. Of course, DevOps is related closely to Agile. However, both these approaches are not on the same page. When you take the case of DevOps, it is focused on administrative and automation processes. The main focus of the approach is to automate and bundle the software. Above all, DevOps enables the active integration and interaction of development specialists associated with the project. Therefore, companies that use the DevOps approach will probably develop and update software products and services quickly.

Pros of DevOps:

Naturally, before implementing any methodology, you will be interested in understanding its benefits. So, it is better to be aware of the benefits of DevOps methodology so that you will take steps to implement it immediately in your organization. The good thing about DevOps is that generally provides cloud-based services. So, it will be easier to associate tools quickly. It offers separate operations, which means that every developer in a team will pay attention to the development of a single tool as against understanding the process as a whole. DevOps contributes to faster turnaround time and better collaboration.  Here are other benefits you can expect from this approach:

1. Improves Skillfullness:

You cannot deny the fact that having skilled people in your workforce can add value to your operations. DevOps can do it for you. It will be possible for DevOps teams to scale their potential to entirely new levels. With DevOps implementation, everything turns out to be more data-driven. So, all employees in your organization will utilize the same set of data. In turn, documentation becomes easier to achieve uniform quality across the organization.

2. Helps Achieve Agility for Quicker Time to Market:

As we are discussing DevOps advantages and disadvantages, one of the biggest advantages that you should be aware of is that this methodology increases overall agility and efficiency in your business. With agility, your business will become quickly reactive and will start responding to the business needs. Agility often comes off as a precondition for any business if one had to be on the winning side of disruption and the other on the demise of the day. The gap between failure and success could be as tiny as the release of an upgrade. Thanks to DevOps it means that the release can happen quickly to prevent failure.

Therefore, DevOps comes with a critical benefit in the present business environment. It holds the pride of being a strategy that could make teams work faster with higher frequency through DevOps and adaptive information technology. Particularly, when it is hard to predict the future, it is essential to have an infrastructure in place that can respond to the requirement very swiftly. Speed to the market with DevOps becomes possible with quick standardization and iteration processes. This is something important in the competitive software development world to win the rat race. As DevOps reduces the time for failure response considerably, every business should follow this approach.

3. Helps Increase Productivity:

DevOps helps to increase productivity in your organization by promoting the speed at which your teams deliver software programs. The teams do it by following an agile mindset. When  discussing DevOps, the teams that first come to our minds are monitoring, automation, collaboration, continuous deployment, continuous delivery and continuous integration. DevOps always motivates the delivery of shortcodes and continuous performance. So, it becomes important for the development teams to work swiftly without any errors. DevOps has some key metrics like unplanned job, application performance, time to detection, costs and code commits to name a few to help organizations improve productivity.

4. Quick Fixing of Bugs:

As DevOps contributes to improved communication and cooperation between the development and operations teams, it becomes possible to streamline the fixing of bugs in any development phase. Again, quick fixing of bugs helps teams increase the speed of delivery of applications.

5. Reduced Chances of Product Failure:

As we are discussing DevOps pros and cons, you should know that with DevOps, it will be possible to reduce the chances of product failure. As bug fixing is done quickly and short releases happen then and there, errors can be spotted quickly. In turn, the chances of product failure will automatically reduce. As a result, the cost to your company for the time and resource wasted on producing a product with errors will reduce.

6. Breakdown of Silos:

The elimination of information technology silos is one of the important benefits of DevOps implementation in your organization. A typical information technology team encompasses certified professionals with specialization in at least five or six disciplines like security, database, networking, storage, Linux/Unix and Windows to name a few. This helps with getting rid of hindrances between different teams like testing, operations and development teams in your organization.

Above all, DevOps has concluded the outdated linear operation, where one team completes all tasks related to the project and then passes it on to another team to work on it. Rather, it introduces a much more flexible approach to deployment and development. In turn, it contributes to more responsiveness to changes in the market conditions.

Cons of DevOps:

When an organization has its production atmosphere in the cloud, it can lead to compatibility issues as the infrastructure test purposes remain complex. To arrange the workflow, infrastructure and integration, in-depth understanding becomes important in the DevOps methodology. Another important negative point about this approach is that it gives more importance to speed over security. As we are discussing both the DevOps advantages and disadvantages, here are the cons of this methodology you should be aware of:

• DevOps implementation is not easy and it needs a proper mindset across the organization to make it work.

• Seeing the benefits of DevOps, if you outsource the DevOps implementation, the business security will reduce

• Dealing with the legacy system is not easy

• Practicing security for continuous delivery and integration is also a challenge in the DevOps atmosphere

• To get the complete benefits of DevOps, your organization should bring together people with the right DevOps knowledge. This is again not an easy task.

• Transmission from an old proven approach to a new approach is always a challenge. This holds even when you implement DevOps. Some employees might be resistant to change. In this case, they should be provided with complete knowledge of the benefits of DevOps implementation and its long-term benefits.

• Challenges tend to occur with the tools

• DevOps needs testing automation, which will take some time initially.

Whether or not to Implement DevOps?

In the present competitive business world, software development companies will have to do everything to stay ahead of the competition. Thanks to the DevOps approach that will help them do things quicker. Also, when you compare DevOps pros and cons, you will notice that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Of course, you will have some initial implementation challenges. But, when these challenges are successfully handled, your organization can get a lot of benefits from DevOps. 

It can improve communication between teams, it can reduce the chances of deployment failure and can ensure shorter development cycles. These are just a few valid reasons to implement DevOps in your organization. When you talk to your friendly software development organizations, who have implemented DevOps, they will tell the lot of benefits they are getting from this approach. When you compare DevOps advantages and disadvantages, the former is undoubtedly more than the latter. So, get into the wagon wheel and you will understand yourself. 

Simpliaxis is one of the leading professional certification training providers in the world offering multiple courses related to DevOps. We offer numerous DevOps related courses such as DevOps Foundation® Certification Training, Docker and Kubernetes Certification Training, Continuous Testing Foundation (CTF)SM Course Description, Continuous Delivery Ecosystem Foundation (CDEF)SM Course Description, DevSecOps Foundation DSOF℠ Course Description  and much more. Simpliaxis delivers training to both individuals and corporate groups through instructor-led classroom and online virtual sessions.