10 DevOps Benefits Enterprises Can Obtain From Automation

DevOps is taking hold across a broad range of organizations, accelerating business more quickly in today’s global environment. Here are 10 DevOps benefits organizations can obtain from the use of automation.

Every server in your infrastructure is configured properly each and every time. You have confidence that your systems are configured in the right way. Customers get a consistent experience. Check out how Etsy updates its code.

No one likes updating documentation. That’s why, in so many cases, it’s stale, outdated and wrong. If your infrastructure is code, the code is self-documenting. This leads to increased accessibility. When new people join your organization, for example, they quickly understand your infrastructure.

You can move with ease from bare metal in a data center to the cloud. Then, you can move from one cloud to another, whether it’s a private cloud or the public cloud.

When there are issues or outages, it’s not a question of how infrastructure is configured. You know, and your teams know, because it’s in the code. Just as importantly, you’re not locked into any one specific deployment platform. You have plenty of options and can confidently rebuild your infrastructure in other places. Read about how CustomInk was able to outrun a hurricane.

Under the old system, creating an environment could take weeks. Now, thanks to a DevOps culture and automation, the team can spin up an entire internet environment in just minutes. See how Standard Bank does it.

Improved configuration helps to increase scale, enabling the creation of hundreds of nodes at once, without any errors. And, when we’re talking about scale, we’re talking about several key dimensions of scale: the number of machines or nodes; the complexity of apps; the number of people on the team; and velocity, or how quickly new features can be brought to market. A platform that supports all four of these dimensions of scale is important here.

Gone are the days of changing a production environment and then just seeing what happens. We now can test early and often, and this gives us more and more confidence the closer we come to launch.

Most people think that constant change and continuous delivery make security even more difficult. But automating DevOps actually makes organizations more secure, because you can ship a new patch—and address the vulnerability—very quickly. Smaller, episodic releases are easier to fix than a large release, which might require a multitude of patches.

This is critical for hiring, because the best and most talented DevOps practitioners today want to be in a vibrant, creative and cutting-edge community. The Chef community, for example, has grown at an annual clip of more than 100 percent for the last three years. It now has nearly 70,000 members.

Eliminating repetitive tasks, speeding up time to deliver infrastructure and applications, and working with a community are powerful, addictive and, frankly, a lot of fun.