Deployment Automation: The Linchpin of DevOps Success

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.

The 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

2015 State of the DevOps Report 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.  

     

2016 State of the DevOps Report 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 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.

The 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

CloudBees 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.

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Get your deployments in order - for free!

CloudBees Flow , our DevOps Release Automation platform, boasts the industry's most comprehensive set of Deployment Automation and Release Management capabilities - including Smart Deploy, push-button Rolling Deployments, Rollbacks, artifact staging, and more. 2016 was a great year for CloudBees Flow, with lots of commercial success and recognition from industry analysts like Gartner  - where we received the highest score in the ARA Magic Quadrant, Ovum , and Forrester. CloudBees Flow allows you to orchestrate the myriad of tools and processes involved in your end-to-end delivery pipeline, and also greatly simplify deployments of both CD-pipelines and traditional releases - to eliminate the risk of failed releases. Download the Community edition of CloudBees Flow to experience the most advanced DevOps ARA platform for yourself, to get your deployments in order - for free!

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Deployment Automation Tips from the #c9d9 DevOps Community

Naturally, we've been discussing Deployment Automation a lot recently on our Continuous Discussions video podcast. Check out these two recent episodes on Deployment Automation 2.0 and Advanced Deployment Patterns for some great tips shared by our expert panel on streamlining your deployments, Docker orchestration, Blue/Green and Rolling Deployments strategies, and more. We hold our #c9d9 podcast every other Tuesday at 10 a.m. PT. Each episode focuses on a different topic and features expert panelists talking about DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Agile and more.