5 Reasons to Use DevOps in SaaS

DevOps is a must-have nowadays. It is an on-practice proven method to improve the software development process. Those who have already encountered and tried DevOps positively comments on this experience:

• 55% have stated a visible improvement in cooperation
• 38% have reported that the quality of the code has arisen
• 63% state that DevOps help the releases become frequent.

These facts and numbers are only a small share of the advantages and improvements that DevOps can bring to your business. In this article, we will dive deeper into the topic to reveal all the necessary information you need to know about DevOps. After reading, you will have a more comprehensive understanding of DevOps, why, and when you can use it.

DevOps: definition, advantages, and principles of work

DevOps is not a physical item or a specific software you can touch or enable. In this case, you can see the positive results after the implementation. 

In a nutshell, DevOps is a combination of tools, principles, and approaches. The main goal is to make the software development process quicker and ensure delivery regularly without losing the quality of the developed product. 

How does it work?

There is no single definition of DevOps, but there is a simple explanation. DevOps does not separate teams by their roles so strictly as traditionally. Therefore, it becomes a single team. Developers, for example, can handle the whole process as a development phase as well as testing or other operations. 

The main advantages are: 

• Process automation. Automation is the most crucial practice of the DevOps approach. Owing to automation, it is easy to cope with the drastic growth of the product and apply essential changes when it is necessary to do so. Speed and quality are the significant factors of the DevOps approach.
• Fast and frequent small deliveries. It is one of the first associations people have when mentioning DevOps. In contrast to the usual SDLC process, the DevOps development cycles are much shorter. What is the benefit of having more small deliveries? They are much easier to deliver fast to get fast feedback and implement necessary changes to the product. It is easy to test and change small and frequent deliveries, which positively impacts the quality of the product.
• Easy to recover. Frequent deliveries help to detect errors, bugs, and issues much earlier than they could be.
• Cost-savings. Except for many other advantages, we cannot avoid cost-saving. DevOps reduces your spending on unnecessary aspects of software development that can be upgraded or automatized. It reduces the number of specialists who have to work manually and, as a result, the budget you spend. 

Reasons to use DevOps in SaaS

Software-as-a-Service as a business model is confidently becoming one of the most popular models among other models. Companies adore SaaS for its fast deployment, pleasurable revenue, and cloud-based system.

DevOps is a crucial part of the successful SaaS development process. With a professional DevOps, you get quicker deployment time and downtime recovery, reduced failure possibility, and time to make it from the initial phase to the deployment. But these advantages are only the tip of the iceberg there are a lot more of them. 

Let’s consider each of them in detail to understand why DevOps is necessary for SaaS development. 

1. Seamless collaboration 

DevOps principle of work fosters a tight collaboration between team members. It means that each team member is responsible for the whole development process and does not depend on the person’s specialty. Such an approach to teamwork positively impacts speed, of course. Seamless collaboration between all the team members makes the software development and deployment much faster than in a traditional software development lifecycle. 

2. Orientation on satisfying customer needs

Any approach’s core goal is to satisfy its customers’ needs. DevOps principles of work allow it to make it easier and faster due to its speed and frequent deliveries. It becomes easier as the software development and deployment management perform the same specialists. It becomes faster, thanks to streamlining the release process.

3. Test-Driven Development

Test-Driven software development means changing the usual development process, when first developers write code, then create tests for this code. In the TDD approach, developers create tests and then write code according to the developed tests. 

Why is TDD beneficial? Such an approach reduces the possibility of errors to a minimum. It allows for increasing the speed of releasing the product.

The process of creating such a test is the following:

• Сreating automated negative test 
• Checking if the test fails 
• Defining the measurements metrics for the code to pass the test
• Refactoring the code
• Repeating the cycle again

4. Microservices

DevOps practice divides complex processes into small pieces. That’s why microservices perfectly fit the DevOps approach. 

Microservices allow you to create an application with various third-party services help that are linked into a single application.

5. Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment

Continuous integration. With CI you can implement necessary changes into code and use automated tests to verify the quality of changes implemented to the code. The core purpose of continuous integration is simple. It is easier to find bugs or flaws in smaller parts of the code than in a big part of the code.

Continuous delivery. The next step after continuous integration is when the code gets out from the CI phase into a production environment. This reduces deployment risks, makes them pretty low, and increases the speed of the deployment process.  

Continuous deployment. Pretty similar to the previous continuous delivery. Continuous deployment means that instead of manual deployment, you get an automated deployment without involving specialists. 

In conclusion, we see that DevOps is a beneficial and vital software development approach in current conditions. Using the DevOps approach to software development, you get a lower budget spending, automated process, better quality, and faster deployment. 

Summing up all the facts about DevOps together, we can state that this approach is worth it and to implement into the development process to reach better results.

References:

upguard.com