Why Adopting a DevOps Approach is Crucial for Your Startup Business

With automation and digitization fixing their hold across all industries to make space for experimentation, adaptation, and better efficiency, DevOps for startups is becoming the new standard of IT. The agility and speed that comes with such development are essential for startup survival. It is not just an approach to improving software delivery but also increasing employee morale and motivation.

Those startups that are still unaware of the advantages of DevOps and DevOps consulting services are in real need of an update. According to a report, 83% of IT decision-makers adopted the DevOps approach in 2021 to gain better business outcomes. Further, the market outgrew the $7 billion threshold in 2021. Currently growing at a CAGR of over 20% between 2022 and 2028, we expect the market to reach over $30 billion by 2028.

In today’s blog, we will get into the details of the criticality of adopting DevOps approach in a startup. While on one hand, we will talk about the various DevOps benefits for startup businesses, on the other hand, we will also look into the working of DevOps and the differences it holds from the traditional software development approach.

Why DevOps for Startups?

Only 10% of the new startups that enter the market each year succeed, despite the fact that there are many of them. Why they fail is the question. The solution is their approach to reach customers to market their products. Bringing together the operations and the development teams enables the startups with faster development and smooth maintenance of existing deployments. Shortening the overall development with the required alterations in the controlled and ongoing manner, DevOps approach increases the rate of success.

Let’s use the example of the startup eCommerce business “ABC” to help you better grasp it. Assume that recently, ABC released its product in the market. At first, the sales are decent, and they can make some money off of it, but as time goes on, the user base has grown, and the product or application needs to be upgraded.

By adopting the DevOps approach, it not only becomes possible but easier to scale, automate, and improve the product and services, managing the growth aspects better.

Having said that, the advantages of adopting DevOps practices in startups are plenty, if one may start counting. Let’s have a look at a few in the next section.

What are the Benefits of Adopting DevOps Approach in Startups?

When you realize the advantages of DevOps for startup businesses, you will surely be convinced to bring the new practices to your system. Let us discuss some general and technical benefits of DevOps for business in the pointers below.

Accelerated Innovation

DevOps approach in startups remarkably shortens the time a product might take to reach the market, which promotes higher innovation at a faster rate. Projects may be built, implemented, and altered considerably more quickly by working collaboratively in small teams and removing redundancy with automation tools.

This close cooperation makes it possible to address problems as they arise, makes problems less complicated, and facilitates improvisation on the go, thus providing quicker solutions.

Better Collaboration

A significant DevOps benefit for business is that its environment promises to construct a bridge to make the two disciplines function better together rather than trying to eradicate the differences between them. It modernizes the software engineering practices in a way that the software development culture consistently emphasizes collective success over individual objectives.

Your software and operations teams can experiment, research, and develop products more successfully with mutual trust. Throwing application code against a wall and hoping for the best is no longer an option. As everyone on the team strives to achieve the same objectives, your development environment becomes increasingly seamless.

Time Saving

One of the major advantages of DevOps for startup businesses is time savings. By increasing the frequency of code releases into the production environment, DevOps approach shortens the development cycle by enhancing collaboration and communication between the development and operations teams.

Companies using the conventional methodology need three to six months to go from the requirement to the release of a product. However, utilizing DevOps for startups, the same cycle can be condensed to a daily cycle and, in certain situations, an hourly release-build cycle. Your company will gain from the competitive advantages provided by continuous development and deployment saving time while providing better outcomes.

Reduced Failures

Offering top-notch software solutions and a first-rate user experience to end users is the main objective of DevOps. The key concept is for companies to offer it with more speed, agility, efficiency, and structure. Thus, one of the DevOps advantages in startups is that it ultimately assists businesses in enhancing the customer experience by delivering creatively developed solutions more quickly.

Better Product Understanding

Not having a shared knowledge of product development is the biggest hurdle for development teams. Many teams receive only a small amount of information on the product under the conventional arrangement.

However, in the case of DevOps, various teams collaborate to carry out various tasks, making it really simple to understand the product information and permitting various teams to have additional knowledge about the product outside of their particular and limited area of expertise. For instance, a developer can obtain data on how the product performs for end users, which can help him plan a strategy to enhance specific features like scaling, user interface, availability, etc.

Better Employee Satisfaction

DevOps encourages a more performance-based corporate culture as opposed to a rule- or power-based one. By doing so, administrative barriers are lessened, and risk sharing is encouraged. As a result, your team is happier and more effective, which improves your company’s performance.

In general, developers and operations engineers prefer a DevOps environment since it allows them to multitask and work more productively. They have a better knowledge of how their position fits into the bigger picture of IT and the company’s overall structure. They become more valuable and marketable as a result.

Also Read: Measuring DevOps Success in the Enterprise with DORA Metrics

How is DevOps Different from the Traditional Software Development Approach?

The engineers and operations staff each do their own thing in the traditional software development approach, and the two teams never interact. This strategy has numerous drawbacks, including ineffective team communication, delayed product delivery, and poor performance.

On the other hand, DevOps is all about collaboration. It combines operations and development teams’ independent management of processes throughout the whole software development lifecycle, from build through a test to release. In the end, DevOps is a culture that fosters productive teamwork and paves the way for agile product delivery.

When you use DevOps-as-a-Service (DaaS), you give a DevOps solution provider business control over the development and implementation processes. To curate, integrate and adjust DevOps methods into your business, fitting in line with your goals, you need to have a capable team with the right resources.

The “Three Ways” approach is the foundation of the DevOps culture. The use of systems thinking, which includes all roles engaged in product creation, including those of customers, is the first principle of this paradigm. A continuous feedback loop is implemented in the model’s “second way,” which is crucial for quicker response times and consistent product release enhancements based on user feedback. The third guiding concept of DevOps emphasizes the value of enhancing human relationships above processes and tools. It is based on ongoing learning and experimentation.

Here are the phases of practically implementing DevOps pipelines:

• Inputs from developers and coding
• Building the code
• Testing the code
• Encapsulating the existing code
• Releasing its versions
• Configuration
• Support and monitoring

Now that you have got a fair idea on why adopting DevOps for startups is crucial, in the final leg of our article, let’s finally look at how the DevOps process actually works in an organization.

[Also Read: Ten Ways DevOps as a Service Fuels Innovation and Propels Growth for Enterprises]

Working of DevOps

The Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is the foundation of the DevOps methodology, which is used to deploy software. A process that’s a perfect fit for businesses looking to produce bug-free products and quicken time to market includes Continuous Monitoring and Continuous Deployment. Take a look at what these are.

Continuous Integration

Through the use of automated builds and tests, continuous integration enables developers to merge code changes into a shared repository many times per day. The advantage: an opportunity to change the code more frequently.

In the end, DevOps engineers can find and repair issues more quickly, ensuring software quality and accelerating the delivery of new products. Through the whole software development cycle, these procedures assist startups in preventing problems before they arise in subsequent phases of development.

Continuous Deployment

This stage includes doing away with manual approval before pushing updates into production. The process ensures that end users receive every new program version on schedule and without interruption.

Continuous Delivery

The DevOps team may streamline the software delivery process and ensure prompt and reliable releases to the end user using this stage, where code changes are automatically created, tested, and prepared for release to the production environment.

Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring makes it easier to spot and resolve problems as they arise and avoid future failures. Automated warnings for error occurrences and the implementation of a continuous feedback loop are essential components of an efficient bug-tracking system.

The advantage of an accelerated feedback loop that results from frequent releases allows developers to address performance problems and other faults more quickly and produce high-quality builds.

Here ‘continuous’ does not refer to a non-stop running mode of the development process. It means that the DevOps must follow the following few practices will be followed at all times:

• Rapid processing: The frequency of software releases rises when the continuous approach is used. Any modifications made to the source code side are quickly and effectively reflected in the final release using continuous processing.
• Process automation: Handle all parts of the software production phases, such as build, test, version control, etc., using a continuous method.
• Continuous processing: When we give a process the same inputs over and over, it produces the same outputs each time, making it a continuous process. We also obtain a similar outcome when we enter the same code.
• Continuous releases: Continuous releases improve process accuracy and outcome quality. Weekly, monthly, or daily releases are possible depending on the users and the teams involved.

Let Appinventiv Gear Your Business to Adopt DevOps

Leverage all the benefits of DevOps for small businesses by working with us at Appinventiv. Our history of working with multiple startups and brands across the globe has helped us develop a reputation for developing reliable and secure digital solutions.

We have helped our startup clients so far raise a collective funding of over $950 Million with our next-gen digital solutions and efficient software development methodologies, including DevOps.

Some of the renowned brands for whom we have achieved unmatched results include Domino’s, KFC, IKEA, and Adidas. Check our complete portfolio of work.

So, why look anywhere else for a DevOps consulting company when Appinventiv is on your side? Contact our experts now.

FAQs

Q. What challenges do development teams face in DevOps?

A. Every development team that adopts DevOps has to overcome obstacles caused by organizational issues in their current business contexts, which become challenges for DevOps’ success. The toughest challenge is to prioritize the significance of the products, initiatives, and applications which require monitoring and deployment in multiple aspects.

DevOps streamlines automation procedures to create corporate agility in order to address these problems. This makes delivering a product with complete dedication and meets higher quality standards easier.

Q. How to avoid DevOps failure?

A. Keep these few tips in mind to avoid failure of DevOps in startups:

• Keep your focus on the “center of excellence” methodology and establish a community of practice.
• Keep security as an important constituent of adopting DevOps for startups.
• Have strong back-end operations that will let your business run effortlessly.
• Irrespective of your company’s size, embrace the cloud.
• Try to simulate probable failure and see how you will tackle those issues.

Q. What are the benefits of automation testing in DevOps?

A. The benefits of automation testing are as follows:

• Supports running several test cases

• Enables simultaneous execution and helps with evaluating a big test matrix

• Encourages the execution of unattended

• Reduces human error to increase accuracy

THE AUTHOR

Sudeep Srivastava

Co-Founder and Director