As an app and browser testing expert with over 10 years of experience across 3500+ real devices, I’ve seen firsthand how DevOps can enable software teams to achieve unprecedented speeds of innovation. For SaaS companies competing in dynamic markets, mastering DevOps is no longer optional – it’s essential to survival and growth.
The DevOps Advantage: Faster Delivery, Greater Resilience
In this guide, you’ll learn how leading SaaS companies like Salesforce, Atlassian and Workday use DevOps to ship better software faster. By adopting DevOps practices and culture focused on collaboration, automation and monitoring, SaaS businesses can:
- Accelerate innovation to drive product-market fit
- Improve system resilience to assure robust services
- Delight customers with rapid fixes and new features
- Increase team productivity to boost feature velocity
- Optimize costs by eliminating waste
These capabilities allow SaaS providers to experiment and learn faster, out-innovate competitors and exceed customer expectations – all imperatives to thrive in the SaaS landscape.
Why Speed and Quality Matter to SaaS Businesses
For SaaS companies, shipping speed correlates directly with success. Consider that high performing teams who adopt DevOps practices are able to:
- Deploy code 46x more frequently
- Decrease lead time by 440x
- Recover from incidents 96x faster
- Reduce deployment failure rates by 5x
This velocity advantage allows them to release small batches to users more often – both delighting customers and learning faster.
SaaS businesses also deal with immense scale – often millions of customers relying on their services. By leveraging test automation, infrastructure as code and robust monitoring, DevOps enables teams to minimize risks and assure resilient systems.
With customers free to switch SaaS vendors, slow feature delivery or downtime erodes trust and loyalty over time. DevOps capabilities can prevent this.
Transitioning to a DevOps Culture
Becoming a high-velocity SaaS business requires changing processes, practices and culture. Some best practices include:
Fostering collaboration and shared ownership: Break down silos between developers, ops and QA. Make quality everyone’s priority through peer reviews and paired programming. Promote blameless cultures focused on collective learning.
Utilizing Agile methods: Adopt user stories, iterative sprints and continuous integration to ship smaller batches faster. Timebox work and delay non-critical features to accelerate innovation.
Leveraging test-driven development: Require automated tests before code check-in. Take a test-first approach utilizing mocks and stubs for rapid, isolated testing. Prevent regressions and interruptions.
Architecting for independent deployability: Decompose monoliths into loosely-coupled microservices for scale. Make services independently deployable without coordination.
Investing in robust monitoring and logging: Ingest metrics, events and logs into tools like Datadog for deep application insight. Log rich data consistently across services. Set alerts to notify teams about emerging issues.
DevOps Toolchain Technologies
Core DevOps toolchains leveraged by SaaS teams include:
- Source control with Git enables history tracking, code review and branch management
- Continuous integration with Jenkins, CircleCI and GitHub Actions to automate build and test
- Infrastructure as code via tools like Terraform and Ansible for automated provisining
- Containerization with Docker packaging for standardized runtimes
- Orchestration with Kubernetes for autoscaling deployments
- Cloud platforms like AWS, GCP and Azure provide managed infrastructure VARIETY OF CLOUD PROVIDERS
- Monitoring via Datadog, New Relic and Amazon CloudWatch for observability
These technologies provide the foundation for high-velocity software delivery at scale.
DevOps in Action: SaaS Industry Leaders
Nearly all leading SaaS providers leverage DevOps principles and practices to fuel their success through faster innovation velocity, resilience and customer satisfaction:
Salesforce
Salesforce credits its rapid release cycles and ecosystem growth to adopting DevOps culture and practices. Leveraging extensive automation and monitoring, Salesforce can now push updates daily with ease.
Atlassian
Atlassian shifted its SDLC to a DevOps model in 2010 – a move the Head of DevOps credits with increasing deployment frequency over 300% while simultaneously improving stability.
Workday
Workday embraced DevOps to accelerate its SaaS delivery speed. By adopting CI/CD pipelines, automated testing and monitoring, Workday can now release new features weekly with zero downtime.
ServiceNow
ServiceNow ingested DevOps philosophies to modernize its architecture with microservices. After re-architecting, it achieved a goal of 95% automated test coverage and implemented over 500 CI/CD pipelines to transform delivery.
The evidence clearly shows DevOps practices enable SaaS teams to ship better software faster. By taking an automation-first approach, architecting for speed and resilience and fostering a culture of experimentation, SaaS businesses can retain customers and outpace competitors.
Start Your DevOps Journey
As a SaaS leader, achieving market leadership depends on your team’s ability to rapidly deliver innovation customers want. DevOps provides the blueprint to transform software delivery through smarter workstreams, automation and culture.
While the DevOps journey requires investment, leading SaaS providers showcase the immense advantages in feature velocity and engineering productivity. By embarking on your own DevOps transformation, you can position your company for customer success – and market leadership.
