Today’s business organizations are facing a lot of pressure to not only understand their customers’ needs but also respond quickly to their shifting needs and expectations. They are also facing additional pressures from the increasing complexities in their systems and enterprise architecture, which require an efficient process of management.

This has prompted many organizations and brands around the world to prioritize competitive differentiation and the operational alignment of their business processes across teams— and at all levels— to break down barriers, achieve better teamwork, and increase efficiencies. And this is where DevOps has proven to be useful. But, what is it about DevOps that makes it attractive in the modern era?

Understanding DevOps

If you’re familiar with how applications were developed during the early days of software development, you know that it took longer to test new ideas and every step in the development lifecycle had to be as detailed as possible. The team tasked to write code and develop software was different from the team that was responsible for managing and maintaining it.

Each team had different priorities and certainly didn’t know about each other’s work culture. And this meant an extremely long feedback loop, which slowed down the development and delivery of applications. Plus, the operations team had to diagnose and fix any issues in isolation after the software had already been deployed. You can see the challenges with this traditional approach. That’s what the DevOps practice seeks to address.

To put it simply, DevOps represents a cultural philosophy which removes the barriers between development and IT operational groups, enabling rapid delivery of IT service or software. It’s also a set of practices that automates (almost) everything in the development process/cycle, making sure applications are developed and deployed in the most reliable and safest way possible.

There’s no doubt organizations that adopt the DevOps philosophy undergo a serious cultural shift, and eventually see a significant improvement in the agility, scalability, and flexibility of their functions and teams. And this can be seen in the cultural transformation big companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Adobe, HP, Netflix, Walmart, and Etsy have experienced after adopting various DevOps solutions in their development environments. There are even various DevOps online courses to choose from. Here’s what you should know about why DevOps is a great option for your development style:

Why DevOps as a Cultural Philosophy is Attractive Today

By addressing the institutional and functional divide between developers (Dev) and those that manage and maintain the infrastructure and software (Ops), DevOps allows an organization to achieve greater predictability and efficiency throughout the development life-cycle. Here are reasons why this cultural philosophy has been gaining popularity— and is attractive today.

From Skill-Centric Silos to One-Team-Thinking

Organizations are increasingly coming to the realization that they can no longer operate with disparate systems, where their development, testing, infrastructure, and operations teams work in isolation. And this is mainly because of increasing demand for exceptional digital user experiences and more customer-centric products. Delivering this is almost impossible with the traditional life-cycle which involves siloed teams.

DevOps allows different teams across departments to start solving problems as one team, working towards a common goal. It’s a cultural shift that prioritizes one-team-thinking over skill-centric siloed teams, thereby getting formerly soloed teams to start talking and collaborating with each other without friction.

From Blame Games to Continuous Feedback

It’s not uncommon for departments to misunderstand each other or even point fingers blaming each other when a problem arises in an organization. Sometimes the reason for this is lack of enough information. As mentioned, DevOps removes the focus from individual departments to the entire team within an organization. This means, in the event there’s a misunderstanding, the affected team can seek clarification or even share more to seek understanding and resolve the issue.

Learning DevOps is about working towards a common goal and having a shared responsibility. As such, with it comes improved communication and continuous feedback across and within teams. This means there’s no more finger-pointing and issues are resolved quickly, increasing efficiency.

Reliability, Agility, and Scalability

Ask anyone who’s been involved in the software development industry and they’ll tell you it becomes extremely challenging to track responsibilities for a specific outcome and ensure reliability as the lifecycle gets more complex. The same happens when there’s increased pressure on the organization’s processes as well. This often results in delays in software delivery and increased issues in the products.

The only solution in this case is to implement a process that supports continuous growth and allows the organization to scale with minimum risks. DevOps has since proven to be that solution. With DevOps, organizations can rapidly develop and deploy applications without compromising the integrity of the existing data and the development environment. This means the teams are able to consistently develop more user-focused software solutions and even make improvements to applications while maintaining a perfect user experience.

Renewed Focus on the Customer’s Needs

In addition to streaming an organization’s processes and fostering a collaborative culture across the teams, DevOps gets everyone involved at any point in the development lifecycle to focus on the customer’s needs and ensure customer satisfaction. DevOps automates processes which enables teams to capture the right data and metrics which they can use to get immediate customer feedback and deliver customer-centric products.