DevOps is a methodology for making software delivery workflows faster, more reliable, and more collaborative. It combines automation with cultural changes to help development and operations teams work efficiently together.
The benefits of DevOps extend beyond developer productivity and the software development lifecycle. DevOps practices directly contribute to business success, such as by accelerating time-to-market and improving incident response times.
In this article, we will discuss different ways in which implementing DevOps practices benefits business outcomes and try to persuade you that it is a worthwhile investment for any organization that builds software.
DevOps is the combination of cultural practices and automation tools that enables software businesses to rapidly deliver high-quality apps. DevOps tightly integrates development and operations teams so everyone can contribute throughout the software lifecycle. It eliminates pain points such as slow manual tasks and siloed knowledge, making the delivery process more responsive.
DevOps doesn’t exist on its own, though; it naturally links with other business improvement initiatives. Shorter feedback loops, simpler inter-team communications, and more reliable deployments all enable you to innovate faster. This improves the experience for developers, customers, and executives alike. Let’s look at what DevOps can contribute to your business.
Here are 15 reasons why you should embrace DevOps practices as a business growth strategy. These benefits are commonly delivered by mature DevOps implementations, but remember that the results depend on how you implement your strategy.
- Enhanced collaboration
- Consistency throughout the development lifecycle
- Faster time-to-market
- Simple knowledge distribution and retention
- Cost reduction
- Improved service reliability
- Simplified product maintenance and longevity
- Boosted teamwork
- Stable security posture
- Shorter feedback loops to implement changes
- Improved scalability
- Automation
- Better customer experience
- Quicker incident response
- Flexibility to adopt new tools
A more collaborative working culture is one of the most immediate DevOps outcomes. DevOps exists to bring people closer together. It’s represented by the name itself, as traditionally separated Development and Operations teams become tightly integrated.
Joining the dots between disciplines makes software delivery more responsive. Devs can self-serve infrastructure, for example, while operators can better understand why developers want resources to be configured in a particular way.
DevOps culture is collaborative by default. Team members can share responsibility and help each other achieve their aims. This promotes skillset growth and lets the business get more done in less time.
To improve collaboration between DevOps engineers and software developers, you need to provide the latter with the possibility of building self-service infrastructure. With Spacelift, developers are empowered to use self-service infrastructure via Blueprints and the K8s operator.
Increased use of automated tools leads to more consistency in development processes. This reduces the risk that deployment errors will occur or critical checks will be overlooked, protecting your business from costly incidents.
Consistency also makes it easier for new team members to get acquainted with your projects. Fewer manual processes to learn means individuals can start contributing business value sooner after they join your organization.
DevOps increases development velocity so you can ship your software more quickly. Faster time-to-market provides a competitive edge: you’ll reach your customers before your rivals, making it easier to stay ahead in the marketplace.
Several factors contribute to how DevOps improves throughput:
- Automation: By automating repetitive tasks, team members can focus on meaningful, high-impact work, boosting productivity.
- Collaborative culture: A culture of collaboration improves efficiency, allowing individuals to easily access and share knowledge, fostering faster problem-solving and innovation.
- Sustained quality at higher output: DevOps practices increase the rate of output without compromising quality, ensuring consistent and reliable results.
The DevOps philosophy of iterative development and short feedback loops is also key to accelerating time-to-market. Working in tight cycles makes it easy to start small and expand later, after collecting user feedback. This could be the difference between being first to market with a useful product or lagging behind a competitor.
DevOps prevents knowledge siloing by ensuring all developers can freely communicate and share their skills. Because everyone works together, acquired knowledge is easier to distribute among team members.
Shared documentation stops you from becoming dependent on specific individuals who may later leave your organization. Knowledge is more naturally retained at the team- and organization-level rather than being held by the person who designed a particular process.
As a business leader, you need your software delivery process to generate a positive return on investment. DevOps improves cost-effectiveness by equipping developers with the resources they need to succeed.
DevOps often requires investment in new tools and services, but this is offset by their benefits. Mature DevOps implementations boost productivity and let you bring products to market sooner, increasing both revenue and development profit margins.
Let’s consider some of the cost-reduction benefits comparing traditional development vs. DevOps:
| Category | Traditional development | After DevOps implementation | Cost-reduction benefit |
| Release frequency | 2-4 times per year | Weekly or daily | Faster feedback, reducing rework costs |
| Deployment failure rate | High, with frequent rollbacks | Low, with quick recovery times | Reduces costs from failure and downtime |
| Development cycle time | Months, often delayed | Days to weeks, continuous delivery | Shorter cycles cut down on operational costs |
| Resource utilization | Underutilized during long waiting periods | Optimized resource allocation | Higher ROI on infrastructure and resources |
| Infrastructure costs | Often over-provisioned | Scalable, automated cloud solutions | Reduced infrastructure expenditure |
| Time to market | Delayed by lengthy testing and staging | Rapid, with automated testing and CI/CD pipelines | Faster release brings in revenue sooner |
See an example: How to Estimate Cloud Costs with Terraform and Infracost
DevOps supports the reliability of your products and services. Greater use of techniques such as automated testing, SAST, and vulnerability scanning means you can catch more issues before they can affect deployments, reducing the number of incidents you’ll encounter.
Moreover, collaborative working methods permit teams to provide earlier feedback on designs. For example, the infrastructure team could spot a problem in a new component that would affect service performance. The team can then work with developers to adjust the design, or proactively reconfigure the infrastructure ahead of the new release.
Overall, DevOps makes it less likely that users will experience a problem. As a result, they’ll stay engaged with your products for longer, improving customer retention and increasing long-term revenue.
Read also: DevOps vs. SRE: What’s the Difference Between Them?
Maintaining older systems is no developer’s favorite task. But DevOps makes this easier by automating many of the tricky parts of the process.
Developers can change code, then lean on their existing CI/CD pipelines, test suites, and IaC configurations to run a build and launch a deployment. This eliminates the often tedious process of running an unfamiliar, infrequently maintained project locally on a developer’s workstation.
Simple ongoing maintenance lets you extend the useful life of your products. For example, you could choose to continue offering security support for older versions to satisfy the needs of customers who can’t upgrade to a new release.
Adopting a DevOps culture fosters improvements in team motivation and engagement. The core principles of collaboration, communication, and transparency give devs easier access to the information they need while encouraging mutual respect. This helps developers to feel valued.
At the same time, automated tooling allows engineers to work more autonomously. They can perform the required actions without having to consult others. Devs can achieve more within the project and have a closer connection to it, improving morale and developer satisfaction. In turn, this will increase developer productivity and retention rates.
DevOps helps establish and maintain a stable security posture. This is vitally important to any business, but particularly those that are subject to specific compliance requirements.
Shipping all code through a standard DevOps delivery process ensures security policies are continually enforced, preventing compliance breaches from occurring.
| Security aspect | Traditional development | After DevOps implementation |
| Code security | Security checks often occur late in the process, increasing the risk of issues at deployment | Continuous security testing integrates early in the pipeline, reducing risks |
| Vulnerability detection | Manual or infrequent scans; potential for delayed detection | Automated and regular scans integrated in CI/CD, allowing quick identification |
| Compliance adherence | Periodic compliance audits may miss issues between checks | Compliance policies enforced continuously across every release |
| Access controls | Manual access provisioning; often inconsistent enforcement | Automated access management with audit trails, ensuring consistent control |
| Incident response | Reactive approach; delayed response time due to lack of automation | Proactive monitoring and faster incident response due to automated alerts |
| Risk assessment | Limited to periodic assessments | Continuous assessment with tools that align with CI/CD pipelines |
| Security patching | Manual patching; prone to delays in production | Automated patch management with minimal impact on operations |
| Visibility and audits | Low visibility into deployment security | High visibility, with continuous audit trails and transparency |
DevOps supports scalability improvements. Increased automation and consistency means you can more easily scale your workflows to accommodate new projects, team members, and customer requirements.
DevOps technologies, such as containers and cloud-native infrastructure, also improve deployment scalability. You can rapidly launch new replicas to handle changes in user demand, ensuring you won’t lose out on sales if demand spikes after a successful marketing campaign or influencer review.
DevOps shortens delivery iterations so developers get feedback faster. Quick access to test results, compliance scans, and observability data from deployed environments lets developers stay productive. They’ll waste less time waiting for results to arrive, benefiting throughput and producing a more satisfying developer experience.
Tighter feedback loops enable you to make more effective business decisions too. You can quickly begin developing a change, then assess its results before continuing. This enables more targeted improvements to processes and products, ensuring no effort is wasted on initiatives that prove to have little impact.
Manual workflows can cripple businesses operating at scale. They make you dependent on specific individuals being available to perform actions when they’re needed. This reduces the amount of time that can be spent working productively on new development tasks.
Manual processes are also more error-prone and can be challenging to replicate across multiple projects and teams.
DevOps practices eliminate this issue by automating key workflows. It lets you systemize critical processes, making them centrally accessible to everyone in your organization. This improves efficiency, democratizes knowledge access, and means more value is delivered to customers in less time.
DevOps automation is where an infrastructure management platform such as Spacelift comes in. Spacelift supports Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Kubernetes and offers you the ability to see a plan of what will change after you run your infrastructure automation either via Spacelift’s UI or directly through your VCS provider.
DevOps ultimately improves the customer experience that your business provides. Users expect their software to be reliable and there when they need it. But at the same time, users often need new features quickly. They’ll explore competitors if you can’t provide the functions they want.
Practicing DevOps allows you to consistently meet these crucial customer requirements. A culture of collaboration and automation makes it possible to ship software faster, without causing quality to slip.
Furthermore, DevOps makes it easier to enhance the customer experience, such as by providing access to preview releases or involving users in the development feedback loop.
DevOps doesn’t mean everything is always perfect. Occasional incidents are a fact of life for software businesses, but it’s how you respond that counts the most.
Using DevOps techniques makes incident resolution quicker and less stressful. A robust DevOps implementation should provide tools that let you quickly find the root cause of incidents, then apply an effective remediation. Because knowledge is shared between team members, there’s also a wider pool of people who can contribute to the response.
Quicker, more efficient incident response means reduced customer disruption and less revenue loss. The iterative DevOps cycle also helps facilitate effective post-incident follow-ups by enabling different teams to coordinate their investigations and swiftly develop permanent fixes.
Flexibility to try new things is one of the enduring business benefits of DevOps. New tools can be difficult to roll out across teams, especially when extra training is required.
However, the systemization of processes using DevOps principles means more changes can be centrally applied. You can integrate new technologies with your CI/CD pipelines and internal developer platforms to make them easily accessible to all developers.
DevOps doesn’t stand still: your implementation should continually evolve in response to the changing needs of developers, operators, product managers, and customers.
The key functions of collaboration and automation make this possible in practice by ensuring everyone is aligned around the same workflows, including after new tools are introduced. This lets your business capitalize on the opportunities provided by emerging technologies, including innovative infrastructure services, cloud platforms, and AI/ML apps.
Now we’ve seen what DevOps can bring to your business, we hope you’re planning how to create or improve your own implementation. You can get started with implementing DevOps by focusing on the five CALMS pillars of Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, and Sharing.
- Culture: Work collaboratively and share responsibility. This makes your business more adaptable as people move between teams.
- Automation: Use automated tooling to simplify and speed up complex tasks such as testing and deployment. This increases development velocity and consistency, letting you bring quality products to market faster.
- Lean: Practice lean working methods by eliminating inefficient processes. This lets your business respond flexibly to changing requirements.
- Measurement: Measure key performance metrics so you can make data-driven process changes. Regular measurement enables early mitigation of problems, reducing development costs.
- Sharing: Widely share knowledge through centralized channels to prevent siloing and improve organizational resilience.
Read our DevOps implementation guide to learn more best practices for using DevOps in your business.
DevOps transforms the way businesses deliver and maintain their software by merging development and operations into a unified workflow. It’s not just about speed—DevOps brings a culture of collaboration and automation that lets teams catch issues early, roll out updates seamlessly with fewer costly errors, and quickly respond to user feedback. By automating routine tasks, DevOps frees up teams to focus on innovation, making the company more adaptable and competitive without compromising on stability or security.
A successful DevOps implementation requires capable tools that automate your processes, including for CI/CD, IaC, and infrastructure management. These fields can be tricky to get right, but dedicated platforms make it easy to control your infrastructure resources—saving valuable time that can be returned to your business.
Spacelift is an IaC management platform that helps you implement DevOps best practices. Spacelift provides a dependable CI/CD layer for infrastructure tools including OpenTofu, Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, Ansible, and more, letting you automate your IaC delivery workflows.
Spacelift is designed for your whole team. Everyone works in the same space, supported by robust policies that enforce access controls, security guardrails, and compliance standards. You can manage your DevOps infrastructure much more efficiently, without compromising on safety.
With Spacelift, you get:
- Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
- Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
- Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, or Spacelift’s Kubernetes operator, enabling your developers to do what matters – developing application code while not sacrificing control
- Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
- Drift detection and optional remediation
Case study example
Global payments platform Checkout.com committed itself to the goal of “IaC for everything,” and Spacelift delivered, offering a platform that teams could start using independently with minimal configuration — all within the constraints of the regulated environment Checkout.com operates in.
DevOps combines automation and cultural practices to bring development and operations teams closer together. This makes the software delivery process more efficient, leading to increased business growth.
This article has explained how a DevOps team can help your business reach its full potential. An effective DevOps strategy will simplify development, reduce product lead times, and consolidate how knowledge is shared and retained. These benefits all help your business to achieve its goals, then sustain them long-term.
Do you plan to implement DevOps in your organization? Or maybe you are seeking ways to improve your processes? Book a demo with our engineering team to discuss your options in more detail.
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