DevOps Gives Organizations the Speed They Need

Organizations are racing to embrace and implement technologies like virtualization, cloud infrastructure, microservices, and containers, and adopt DevOps tools and practices. Why? There are a number of reasons–but there is one prevailing reason that spans all of these tools and technologies: They enable a company to develop better products faster, and that gives them a competitive edge.

“I feel the need … the need for speed!” ~ Maverick

According to a recent report from Chef, one of the driving motivations for companies is based on this Maverick quote from the movie “Top Gun”: The need for speed. Getting better products to market faster is a competitive advantage that gives companies an edge over rivals—and DevOps, microservices and containers provide the fuel to speed things up.

Chef conducted a survey to gain a better understanding of trends and technology adoption within the Chef customer community. A Chef blog post explains, “In the first few weeks of January we received over 1,500 responses. While that’s a small slice of our user base, we received responses from around the world, across all industry verticals. This varied sample pool allows us to get a pulse on the challenges most directly impacting the Chef community.”

In a nutshell, the Chef survey found that DevOps is having a fundamental impact on the shape and practices of IT organizations. Companies are embracing DevOps, cloud infrastructure, virtualization, microservices and containers—all in an effort to streamline development and deploy faster.

Here are a few of the highlights from the Chef report:

• The majority of teams surveyed are releasing changes to production not monthly, weekly or even daily, but on demand. Likewise, teams overwhelmingly report reducing the time it takes between an initial software commit and running code in production to mere hours from weeks and days.
• Cross-functional teams are 17 percent more likely than application teams to release changes to production on a continuous, on-demand basis. Further, cross-functional teams are 23 percent and 24 percent more likely than infrastructure and security teams, respectively, to release changes to production on demand.
• When a failure occurs in production, the majority of respondents (55 percent) are able to recover in one hour, the shortest possible recovery time in the survey. One-third of respondents (33 percent) are able to recover in the next window of four hours.

Check out the full post at DevOps.com: Chef Report: DevOps Feeds the Need for Speed.