In the past 4 years, I have been helping many companies of all sizes and budgets to integrate, switch or migrate to a DevOps philosophy. Many of them didn’t understand in the beginning why they wanted to start using a DevOps approach, but since the word was hip and “everybody is starting to use it”, they wanted it.

As we went thru the assessment process, looking on what needed to be changed, improved, automated or left as it was originally, one single aspect of their processes became clear and was common between all of the companies: they were always suspicious that something was wrong when they were deploying their software, or scaling, or doing pretty much anything. This problem was critical in their day-to-day operations, since every task that involved a change took much more time to be put in production due to the manual double and triple check, and even then, the overall sensation that “something will go wrong” all-the-freaking-time. Of course, this can be nerve-wracking for anybody.

This sparked a thought that was in my head until I could made sense of it, round up that thought and write it in a sentence:

DevOps is all about confidence.

Confidence that your infrastructure

• can be created with the minimal possible effort.
• can be updated easily or consistently.
• will be resilient on external change.
• will adapt to new requirements.
• will grow as your business grow.
• will heal itself if necessary.

Confidence that your code

• will be integrated seamlessly.
• will be as bug free as possible, or the bugs will be detected and reported in time.
• will be analyzed for statistics thus giving the possibility of improvement.

Confidence that your application…

• will be deployed without errors.
• will be deployed consistently in the platform of your choice.
• will run accordingly to your expectations.
• will be up and running thru all the deployment process.
• will scale up and down seamlessly.

Confidence that your team

• will focus on software development instead of worrying about the day-to-day operations, even from day 1.
• will have the least possible time-to-market for new features.
• will have a way to monitor and follow all the stages of your application’s life cycle.
• will have a way to detect, fix and deploy quickly and efficiently any bug it might have slipped by.
• will be happier, since there will be much less chance that the phone will ring at 2:00 am.

Confidence that your company

• is ready for change and will adapt to change rapidly if desired.
• can support sudden growth without falling behind of the market needs.
• will survive any outage.

Confidence is crucial in today business. Everything changes rapidly, companies that were in the Fortune 100 can fall out of that list from one year to another, something that was unthinkable 10 years ago.

Confidence will allow your business to grow, change, adapt and innovate without fearing technological failure. In software development, DevOps provides that much necessary confidence.