Deployment Automation: The Linchpin of DevOps Success

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Deployment Automation is the linchpin of DevOps transformation. I cannot put it more simply:
To accelerate your DevOps adoption, and get the biggest bang for your buck: FOCUS ON DEPLOYMENTS.

2015-2016-state-of-the-devops-reportsThe previous State of the DevOps reports have shown a pretty straightforward equation:

Deployment frequency is THE indicator for success
and deployment pain is a predictor of failure.

More Deploys

We all remember the impressive hockey-stick graph from the 2015 report, comparing the number of deploys/day/developer between high-performing IT organizations (in Orange) and low-performing ones.

That difference became even more staggering in the 2016 research.

The 2016 State of the DevOps report showed that high-performing IT organizations deploy 200 times more frequently than low performers, with 2,555 times faster lead times.
 

Less Pain

The 2016 State of the DevOps report showed that high-performing IT organizations deploy 200 times more frequently than low performers, with 2,555 times faster lead times.

The 2015 report found that deployment automation (along with CI, testing and version control practices) predicted lower levels of deployment pain, higher IT performance, and lower change failure rates.

banging-head-against-a-wallThe reports show that those high performing IT organizations also have higher employee loyalty and engagement.

On the other end of the spectrum: deployment pain is correlated with employee churn.

This makes Deployment automation one of the clearest examples of the convergence of the 2 axes of DevOps: the technology/process axis, and the culture/people one.

If your talent is running for the hills, and your developers are tired of banging their heads against the wall trying to get stuff to work — you should look at how you deploy.

ARA

Not only the State of the DevOps reports, but ALL analyst research confirms how critical deployments are. For example, in the recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Release Automation, Gartner mentions that ARA – which Deployment Automation and release coordination are key tenants of – is the most important technology to an organization’s adoption of DevOps.

Bottom Line

Electric Cloud focuses primarily on Application Release Automation and on the Ops-side of large-scale deployment automation because we understand the bottom line is pretty simple:
To accelerate your DevOps transformation, and keep employee satisfaction high – focus on deployments.

Read the full article here.