Why is DevOps important?

Have you heard about Site Reliability Engineers before? You might hear of DevOps engineers, though; it's all the same. If you don't have a clue about what I'm talking about, that's not a problem; as a business owner, I'm sure you will face it somewhere in the future. Optimization would be the keyword for this post. Now let's keep it simple as a one-sentence explanation.

DevOps is a methodology for the optimization of all software life cycle processes. DevOps is a practice that improves the work of development and operations teams by automating repetitive tasks in software delivery processes, enhancing communication and collaboration, and shortening the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Who are DevOps-oriented engineers? They are some kind of creators and maintainers being at the intersection of IT operations and software development. They understand what it takes to maintain IT infrastructure and are able to write code and deploy new services.

Easy enough, so the question is, why is it so important?

Before we start, quick thx to the author of this article for providing great info about DevOps, a lot of my thought was based on it.

Let's start! Finding middle or big businesses without a DevOps engineer in their core team is impossible. From the report of the Atlassian DevOps Trends Survey 2020, we know that 99% of responders say that DevOps has positively impacted their organization. Sounds like advertising to me, but taking the leading role in the performance due to automation, Google reported in State of DevOps 2021 on the practices that drive successful software delivery and operational performance. Data collected for seven years involving 32 000 professionals showed a growth of elite performers to 26%. That means a quarter reached a significant decrease in lead times for changes to production.

If your project is still running with developers who wrote the code work independently of the operations engineers who deployed and maintained that code - bad news, you are losing a lot of potential. Look at the leaders; DevOps Institute reported that 60% of organizations plan to onboard DevOps specialists or are on the way to doing it. Transformation to the DevOps model happens, and development and operations teams are no longer siloed.

Every year, we continue to see how the industry evolves and accelerates the ability to deliver software with more speed and better stability. It is achieved through synergistic work both in delivery and operational excellence.

Security issues are also closely related to the speed of delivery. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in malicious attacks. Organizations are adapting and moving from reactive to proactive measures. Security measures are also part of the software supply chain and are part of DevOps (DevSecOps).

So, do you need a DevOps engineer?