Real-World Problems Solved By DevOps

To gather insights on the state of the DevOps movement in 2017, we talked to 16 executives from 14 companies who are implementing DevOps in their own organization and/or providing DevOps solutions to other organizations.

Here's what they told us when we asked, "What are some real-world problems solved by DevOps by your company or clients?"

It’s all about the pipeline. Visualizing progress provides a more realistic, tangible way to optimize the development process. It takes time to get to visualization. You need a solid DevOps foundation to automate the lifecycle and get the most out of visualization. Like cars and cell phones, you must decouple the hardware and software to be effective.

Build better quality software with more test automation. Test-driven development and code faster with better quality.

Implementing features, upgrades and security updates to ensure we have the best password manager and digital vault in the world.

1) An online trading company used to be able to deploy only after trading hours. Late nights and weekends were bad for employee morale and releases may take several weeks. We worked for them for two weeks and showed them how to deploy in 45 seconds. It was an “aha moment” for grassroots contributors and champions alike. 2) A large mobile company in China needed to reduce cycle times for development, building, and testing. We created a backbone of automation to get internal customers on board. After they saw the reduction in the build, test and deployment there was a line out the door from all the other team that wanted to implement the automated methodology.

Automating all testing. There’s a proliferation of operating systems, browsers, and devices. We keep track of all the updates removing testing from the chain of development so developers can focus on building business value.

It used to be developers threw code over the wall to operations and told them how many servers they needed. Now the hardware is typically ready before the software.

We are generally able to receive a bug report and turn around a fix in one day, with high confidence that the fix has not introduced any subtle regressions. We have several customers that, through the adoption of our tools, can do the same for the applications they've built on our platform.

A large retailer is recognizing the velocity of delivery, being ready to release, quality, measuring the cycle of the team. Use JIRA to look at story points. See all the way through to Jenkins for release. Understand the build process. See across multiple teams when code is built as it is happening, failing, resolving build problems, and automatically fixing them.

The BBC delivers data to marketing on the performance of the web environment enabling them to see the impact on the metrics that matter to them.

Ability to use real data securely.. DevOps shows where the most difficult security that needs to be done. We need to include security in the DevOps process. Bring production data into DevOps process without corrupting the data.

We use continuous integration to scale up quickly and with quality. We have done this with Vinli, ParkHub, Robin, Natural Dental Implants, MVP Index, Emma airport management, and many other products and solutions.

We have big clients. Intel, Whirlpool, and Cisco have 150 geographically distributed developers. We ensure check-in of source code so the development process is reduced. Phillips Healthcare replaced manual testing with automated and saved $300,000. Sage went from average test time per script from 90 minutes per script (manually) to 20 minutes (automated). We monitor APIs so companies like 1-800-Flowers can ensure their website is up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Bet 365 is a gaming company with a complex application portfolio doing several thousand updates every day on multiple technology stacks. Charter telecommunications has more than 100 apps and are running a business system stack as well as an operations system stack with different applications teams. These teams are now integrated on a single platform with a common interface.

Much quicker back and forth between DevOps and Security and the ability to bring security into the development process earlier. A quick cycle with small segments of code with errors finely pinpointed for developers. Ability to automate the process and get fast results without delaying the SDLC process and continuous integration. The ability to analyze source code incrementally rather than all the code. Just analyzing modified lines of code saves a lot of time.

HCS has been able to grow their environment without outages of their SaaS solution. They’ve been able to execute and build their architecture over time without losing the trust or revenue of the healthcare provider market they are serving.

We provide a solution for continuous integration and continuous delivery making the threshold so low you can move everything over to GitLab with parallel builds. This enhances the ability to collaborate.

What are some real-world problems you and your organization are solving with DevOps?

By the way, here's who we spoke to! 

1. Michael Schmidt, Senior Director, Automic

2. Amit Ashbel, Director of Product Marketing and Cyber Security Evangelist, Checkmarx 

3. Sacha Labourey, CEO and Founder, CloudBees

4. Samer Fallouh, V.P. Engineering, Dialexa

5. Andrew Turner, Senior Architect, Dialexa

6. Andreas Grabner, Technology Strategist, Dynatrace

7. Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud 

8. Job von der Voort, V.P. of Product, GitLab 

9. Charles Kendrick, CTO, Isomorphic Software 

10. Craig Lurey, CTO and Co-Founder, Keeper Security 

11. Josh Atwell, Developer Advocate, NetApp SolidFire

12.  Joan Wrabetz, CTO, Quali

13.  Joe Alfaro, V.P. of Engineering, Sauce Labs 

14. Nikhil Kaul, Product Marketing Manager Testing, SmartBear Software 

15. Harsh Upreti, Product Marketing Manager API, SmartBear Software 

16. Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate, Splunk