How Can DevOps benefit SaaS Companies

To succeed in the SaaS (Software as a Service) sector, enterprises need a superior product that outperforms the competition. Nevertheless, a fantastic idea and a competent initial build are insufficient to ensure market share. 

To increase the user base and revenue on time (or early), teams must be able to:

• Provide new code promptly and dependably.
• Build a scalable, robust application environment Give users a killer experience

DevOps SaaS automation makes it easier than ever to achieve continuous delivery, high scalability, and high resilience. 

With DevOps, SaaS startups and growth-stage firms may fulfil strategic goals more quickly and provide a better user experience, earning a much-needed competitive advantage and distinguishing themselves in the crowded SaaS market.

DevOps has rapidly attracted the attention of the IT industry and is today regarded as “the fuel of business transformation.” In today’s fast-paced workplace, on-time delivery and quicker processing times in app development are crucial to the expansion of businesses. 

DevOps, which is achieved by combining integration, interaction, automation, testing, continuous deployment, and monitoring, is gaining popularity rapidly due to its capacity to create enormous quantities of output with low post-production faults. DevOps is a work culture that detects and resolves problems faster than the conventional paradigm. The team has more time to debate new ideas because vulnerabilities are routinely tested automatically.

DevOps SaaS platforms are anticipated to be crucial in the coming years, as it enables enterprises to create and deploy software considerably more quickly while meeting all important operational requirements for the availability of end-user services. The global DevOps market was worth $7,398 million in 2021 and is predicted to reach $37,227 million by 2030, expanding at a CAGR of 20% from 2022 to 2030.

DevOps Market Growth

In the coming years, the DevOps industry is anticipated to be primarily driven by the continued use and utilisation of cloud technologies, rapid application delivery and management, and advancements in machine learning. Despite the impact of COVID-19, the global DevOps market has expanded significantly during this time period due to a rapid increase in demand for software and online web-based applications, as well as a growing demand for DevOps solutions among businesses to streamline the process of software application development and boost their customers’ online presence. It has boosted the number of IT firms that offer software solutions, enabling cross-functional enterprises to be more agile and provide more operational efficiency during a pandemic.

DevOps SaaS market expansion is also anticipated to be fueled by the increased demand for modern technology to boost corporate performance and organisational improvement by organisations. Operations development enhances the performance and dependability of an application over time, while enhanced collaboration between IT departments increases a company’s productivity and adaptability.

DevOps technologies are essential platforms for all types of businesses seeking to be efficient, competent, and responsive to fast shifting market demands. The capacity of DevOps technologies to analyse and assess inefficiencies throughout an application, find and optimise issues, and assure speedy updates and processing will likely fuel market expansion throughout the projection period. Some of the  leading worldwide DevOps market players are:

• Amazon Web Services, Inc.;
• Eggplant Limited, CA Technologies (Broadcom);
• Google, LLC (Alphabet);
• Dell Technologies;
• Atlassian Corporation Plc.;
• Cisco Systems, Inc.;
• GitLab, Inc.;

DevOps-ready solutions are in great demand because they assist businesses in promoting DevOps features as well as minimising coding mistakes. DevOps technology has numerous advantages, including predictability, maintainability, cost-effectiveness, decreased risk and time to market, resiliency, reproducibility, and improved quality. These are the primary benefits fueling the growth of the global SaaS-DevOps market throughout the forecast period of 2022-2030.

Fitting DevOps for SaaS

DevOps, or the combination of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), is an organisational strategy that accelerates application development and simplifies deployment maintenance. This paradigm combines not just development and operations (DevOps), but also quality assurance (QAOps), security (DevSecOps), processes, and tools.

One of his articles, Robert Stroud, has remarked that DevOps is all about “fueling corporate transformation.” 

Using specialist software solutions to implement DevOps methods is the only way to improve production without sacrificing quality. This set of principles and procedures enables businesses to continually produce services or products, hence reducing the software development lifecycle.

Conceptually, DevOps is a community of practice devoted to the study of building, developing, and operating flexible and agile systems of any size. DevOps took the emphasis on quality and service from Lean and Agile.

DevOps Lifecycle

To incorporate DevOps automation into the strategy for an enterprise SaaS service, teams must:

1. Realign the software development architecture and process : Assess the organisation’s architecture and practices. To realise continuous integration and delivery, ensure that your application and process are built in accordance with DevOps. Consider microservices, which are autonomous yet interdependent functional blocks that make up the app as a whole. Also, commit to compiling the code frequently and early; do not save integration till the end of the waterfall.
2. Plan out deployment : To increase deployment speed and make continuous delivery a reality, teams must sketch out every stage of the deployment process. Whenever possible, identify inconsistencies and standardise the development procedure.
3. Automate deployment : Once the teams have laid out and standardised the deployment process, automate delivery to the point where anyone in the organisation can push a button to distribute code.
4. Automation of testing :  Automate the testing process to avoid bugs from slipping through the gaps and make rollbacks easier. Get the team on board with new testing standards to plug every figurative hole.
5. Alerting:  Monitor each step of deployment with automated alerts that tell the team in real-time if something goes wrong.
6. Enhance feedback loops :  When the staff becomes accustomed to hearing and responding to alerts, tighten feedback loops to accelerate problem resolution.

When Should SaaS companies adopt DevOps

The requirement of implementing DevOps into SaaS practices can be done at various stages in the project lifecycle.

While Starting a Project

While planning future features, a DevOps specialist can help define the technological stack and architecture of a SaaS product during Sprint Zero.

Professionals can create distinct environments for testing and production.

During a current project

1. Implementation of DevOps in an existing project begins with an examination of the system and its documentation. To complete certain activities, such as CI/CD setup, they must:

• Determine which technologies are employed.
• explore databases
• examine the configuration of networks, servers, etc.

This stage is required for determining what must be improved or fixed. This phase can take anything from several hours to a few days, depending on the circumstances.

2. Infrastructure and security enhancements are crucial for a DevOps SaaS platform. DevOps specialists evaluate what works effectively and what needs to be corrected as a result. They run tests, study the infrastructure, and evaluate the data protection security procedures. In light of these enhancements, DevOps engineers can create infrastructure as code (IaC). This can be accomplished by contacting our DevOps team. IaC streamlines the development process and accelerates the implementation of changes. This service simplifies infrastructure administration for SaaS firms.

3. When opting to update the server class level, DevOps consulting is also helpful. DevOps specialists can recommend server performance solutions, benchmarking, pricing, and risk, among other things.

4. DevOps is also responsible for regularly monitoring the server and assessing the health of the system. This enables rapid responses to system conditions, such as CPU load, server space, etc.

5. Log management is one of the most effective techniques for increasing development productivity. Fine-tuned log management is essential since it expedites troubleshooting and problem resolution.

Benefits of implementing DevOps for SaaS companies

The great majority of IT businesses, startups, and multinationals use DevOps SaaS platforms to address the ever-increasing demand for software and applications. Amazon, Etsy, Netflix, and Facebook have all successfully implemented DevOps techniques.

The objective of DevOps transformation is to enable businesses to create environments for their products that are more reliable in less time. Long-term research presented in the annual Accelerate State of DevOps Report demonstrates that effective DevOps firms develop and deploy software substantially more quickly while adhering to all important operational requirements regarding end-user service availability.

Compared to low-performing peers or those who are still hesitant about embracing DevOps, high-performing DevOps teams exhibit superior performance.

• They tend to deploy code 46 times more frequently.
• Decrease lead time from commitment to deployment by 440 times; 
• recover from outage 96 times faster; 
• and have a fivefold lower failure rate when replacing (the probability of failing changes is one-fifth as high).

DevOps can eliminate the majority of software development delays. Developers are able to respond to business needs in near real-time. They no longer have to choose between speed (frequency of deployment; time to market) and product stability. Using proper DevOps SaaS best practices, the DevOps paradigm expects that both parameters are maintained at a high level.

There are three distinct classes of benefits:

Technological benefits

• A quicker resolution to the issues
• Hastens efforts to reduce human errors
• Less difficult project management process
• Streamlined product life cycle with uninterrupted supply

Cultural benefits

• Motivated, productive, and contented groups
• qualified personnel for specific responsibilities
• Enhanced chances for professional growth and interdepartmental knowledge sharing

Business benefits

• Quicker time to market for new capabilities or merchandise
• A more resilient and stable operational environment More interagency cooperation and communication
• Introducing innovations and developing new customer features.

Best Practices for implementing DevOps in SaaS

1. Implement a culture of collaboration 

DevOps’ raison d’être is to eliminate silos and enhance cooperation across the development, operations, and quality assurance teams. This level of cooperation needs a shift in the attitude and mentality of the entire development team, as well as a clear understanding of the overarching target and set of objectives.

In DevOps, all team members are responsible for development and operations, independent of their respective positions. This enables leaders to expedite software development and delivery to clients. 

2. Customer satisfaction orientation

Whether employing the traditional waterfall model or the entire DevOps methodology, the objective is to match customer expectations, which requires frequent updates and speedy delivery of new features. DevOps simplifies the release process. Because the same individuals write the code and manage the releases, it becomes easier to introduce new features to the client.

3. Agile and Scrum integration

The adaptable nature of discrete iterative development steps works well with the DevOps methodology, resulting in deployments that are even quicker. By merging DevOps and Agile, businesses may deliver core functionality with seamless integration of customer feedback, and reviews. Instead of wasting time designing features that may not be necessary, teams can repeat them as needed.

4. Adopt TDD

Before writing the actual code, software engineers must first develop automated tests. With Test Driven Development (TDD), software developers adhere to a brief development cycle:

• Create a specification-compliant failed automatic test scenario.
• Ensure that the test fails
• Write the minimum amount of code necessary to pass the exam.
• Reengineer the code
• Continue the cycle

TDD significantly minimise the chance of software mistakes associated with each release, allowing businesses to swiftly deploy the product.

Automated testing reduces the workload involved with manually executing tests through the use of specialised software to coordinate test execution, compare results, and expedite difficult operations with ease.

5. Use Microservice architecture as the default for SaaS

While monolith architecture remains the preferred mode for many enterprise-grade software products, microservices architecture is essential for the creation of SaaS DevOps products. Testing Strategies for Monolithic vs Microservices architecture differ significantly. Loose coupling of services expedites the growth of potentially enormous products with scalability goals — with fewer resources and downtime.

For SaaS systems, the transition to microservices from monoliths is unstoppable. These products service millions of customers and cannot afford downtime; therefore, they demand simple scalability and multiregional and multi currency payment systems.

6. Continuous Performance monitoring

Continuous monitoring of performance is one of the most effective DevOps approaches. Only by monitoring accurate performance measures, such as lead time, the average time to discovery, and problem severity, can the effectiveness of a DevOps methodology be determined.

Monitoring these indicators is also beneficial because it enables you to identify when something goes wrong. The DevOps tracking KPIs will rely on the organisation’s objectives and expectations. Some indicators, such as unit cost, are useful for any engineering team since they correlate with profitability.

To Sum Up

Without a doubt, Software as a Service (SaaS) is currently the most alluring business model. It furnishes Saas entrepreneurs with high-quality code and a scalable application environment that satisfies consumer requirements without incurring investment risk.

Only by integrating SaaS with DevOps, which ensures process efficiency and continual improvement to produce infrastructure-ready solutions, can its real potential be unlocked.

DevOps for SaaS bridges the gap between development and operations, accelerates time to market, reduces operational expenses, and, according to a poll of 48% firms, is crucial for business development. These benefits are supporting sustainable growth in the worldwide DevOps software industry. It will increase from $2.9 billion in 2017 to $57.90 billion by 2030.

There are a variety of activities in which DevOps can support SaaS enterprises, including rebuilding the architecture, managing DNS and databases, migrating your project to a new server, and troubleshooting in the event of a failure.

Regardless of whether SaaS enterprises adopt DevOps, they should consider leveraging testing platforms like BrowserStack Automate, which easily integrate into developers’ CI/CD pipelines to enable agile teams to scale up, to get the most out of a CI/CD testing strategy. 

BrowserStack integrates with various CI/CD tools to facilitate the implementation of DevOps. This includes Jira, Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis CI, and more technologies. 

It also provides a cloud Selenium grid of 3000+ real browsers and devices for testing purposes. Moreover, built-in debugging tools allow testers to instantly detect and address errors.

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