DevOps for tech companies and startups: Learn from over 32,000 professionals on how to drive success with Google Cloud’s DORA research

Many technology-driven organizations and startups use DevOps as a business enabler, allowing them to bring ideas to market quickly, increase developer productivity, and increase their customer base. Adopting DevOps workflows can drive success but many companies continue to struggle with how to get started or optimize the DevOps tools they currently have incorporated.

Google Cloud’s DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team helps organizations to deploy faster, scale on demand, and balance costs by providing essential tools and resources for you to succeed. Over the past seven years, our DORA team has surveyed more than 32,000 professionals worldwide via our yearly Accelerate State of DevOps reports (SODR). As the largest and longest-running research of its kind, the SODR provides data-driven industry insights that examine the capabilities and practices that drive software delivery and operational and organizational performance - no matter the industry. 

Read below to learn more from our DORA team about how and why your organization should focus on DevOps this year: 

Benchmark your team, identify improvement opportunities

Our DevOps Quick Check is based on DORA research and allows companies to gauge their DevOps implementation with just five multiple choice questions. The DevOps Quick Check uses the four key DevOps metrics to help your team assess your current performance, compare your performance to others in your industry, and identify which capabilities are most likely to impact your performance. Teams in every industry recognize the value of quickly taking code from development to production and are looking for ways to improve their organizations' agility. Compromising stability is not an option. The data from the research program shows that speed and stability go hand-in-hand, in fact elite performing teams are nearly twice as likely to have increased software delivery performance and achieve 6570x faster lead-time-to-deploy changes.

Increasing developer productivity

Along with driving software delivery performance, DevOps helps to increase developer productivity by reducing burnout - something that is a top priority for many organizations. According to the SODR, 89% of respondents worked from home during the pandemic but teams with a generative team culture, with people who had feelings of inclusion and belonging within their team, were half as likely to experience burnout. A generative culture along with easy to use developer tools help to streamline developers’ workflows and the process of working with cloud infrastructure.

Developer tools that keep developers focused on what they do best, writing code,  is vital to increase developer productivity. Companies should utilize tools that ensure developers spend as little time as possible containerizing applications while increasing automation are paramount. 

We commonly see developers leverage Docker to bring modern applications to life, and there are many benefits of doing so, especially in terms of portability. However, using Docker increases the operational burden on developers. Whereas those that leverage Buildpacks are able to reduce operational burden while supporting enterprise operators who manage apps at scale. They are able to do this because Buildpacks allows code to go straight from source to production, in addition to making it easier to meet security and compliance requirements without developer intervention. 

Plus when developers want to speed up the deployment process with flexibility they have the option to leverage Cloud Run, our fully managed serverless platform offering, which fully supports the use of Buildpacks. Below are some benefits developers and operators can see from Cloud Run:

1. Increased Productivity: make it easier for developers to onboard more quickly and deploy faster 

• Hiring: choose a platform that makes all developers productive. Serverless platforms, like Cloud Run, help developers who know fewer programming languages become  productive without the need to also be an IT expert 

2. Decreased Time to Market: accelerate software releases and value creation to customers that ultimately increase revenue and customer loyalty

3. Decreased Cost: Cloud Run abstracts away all infrastructure management by automatically scaling up and down from zero almost instantaneously - so you only pay for what you use

Whether you choose Cloud Run or another offering - it’s not just which cloud infrastructure you choose, but how you implement cloud services that really matters. This is especially important when it comes to being able to scale quickly and efficiently. In the SODR, we found that Elite performers were 3.5 times more likely to have met all essential NIST cloud characteristics. In terms of scaling, the characteristic of rapid elasticity is key to rapidly scaling outward or inward with demand. In other words, it is very important that your capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released - so no matter how much you grow, your customers always have access to your services. 

The Business Case for DevOps

Maybe you're convinced that achieving better speed and stability will help your team but how do you convince your boss?

The ROI of DevOps Transformation provides IT and business decision makers an industry backed, data-driven foundational basis for measuring their investment in DevOps. We found that money saved from DevOps transformation varies from $10M to $259M a year with a return on investment of approximately 30 days. You can use the metrics you provided in the DevOps Quick Check along with some additional information to get an estimate on your team's potential return.

Google Cloud DevOps Awards

Using a collection of these resources along with an objective assessment of how your team is doing, your organization will be able to get quick insights into improvement areas. Change your work by improving these capabilities to deliver more innovation to your customers and improve the speed and stability of your software delivery.

Now that we have shared some of our DevOps best practices with you, we would love to hear about how you are transforming your organization with DevOps. During our awards celebration in March we will be celebrating how our most advanced teams are using DevOps, so tell us about the positive impact that DevOps has had on your teams, customers, and organization. Enter your submission for the Google Cloud DevOps Awards today. But don't delay! The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2022.

What questions do you have about incorporating DevOps practices into your daily work? Reach out to our experts at Google Cloud.