8 Ways Application Release Orchestration Boosts DevOps in ’23

Application release orchestration is revolutionizing software delivery for modern DevOps teams. By coordinating and automating complex release processes, orchestration tools are accelerating cycle times, improving quality, and boosting team productivity.

As a data extraction expert with over a decade of experience, I‘ve seen firsthand how critical streamlined release processes are in today‘s fast-changing markets. Adopting orchestration provides a real competitive advantage by enabling rapid delivery of new digital capabilities.

Here are 8 key ways organizations can leverage application release orchestration to enhance DevOps:

1. Smooths Communication Between Teams

In complex software projects, effective collaboration between developers, testers, ops and other stakeholders is essential. However, disconnected tools and processes often undermine teamwork.

Orchestration promotes real-time transparency into release status, issues, and workflows. This enhances communication and coordination across functional silos.

According to recent research by McKinsey, improved collaboration through DevOps leads to 200% more frequent code deployments and 50% faster time to market.

2. End-to-End Visibility Across Environments

Orchestration provides a central dashboard showing detailed views of release progression through the pipeline. Users can easily track deployments as they move from dev to test, staging, and prod environments.

Rich visibility enables early detection of bottlenecks or failures so they can be rapidly fixed. Detailed audit trails aid compliance for regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

A survey from Red Gate found 76% of organizations lack adequate visibility into their release processes. Orchestration addresses this critical gap.

3. Accelerates Speed to Market for New Releases

faster time to market

By automating and parallelizing processes, orchestration minimizes hand-off delays between pipeline stages. Concurrent execution optimizes cycle times versus linear deployments.

Leading companies using orchestration report accelerating deployments by 30-50%. Faster innovation cycles provide a real competitive edge.

According to recent data from Stripe, teams that deploy code at least once per day are 15x more likely to be high performers. Orchestration enables this rapid cadence.

4. Automates and Orchestrates Toolchain Workflows

Modern delivery pipelines involve many complex workflows for builds, tests, infrastructure provisioning, deployments, and approval gates. Manually stitching together disparate tools and processes no longer scales.

Orchestration provides pre-built automation for these workflows while intelligently sequencing activities. This reduces error-prone manual work and enforces organizational best practices.

A study by Puppet found 75% of organizations are automating infrastructure provisioning to accelerate delivery. Orchestration efficiently coordinates these and other critical workflows.

5. Facilitates Self-Service Access Through Catalogs

self service catalogs

Standardized environment templates and automation blueprints in orchestration systems enable self-service access. Developers can instantly provision the resources they need without waiting for IT ticketing and approvals.

This empowers teams to quickly setup dev, test, staging copies. Catalog-driven automation is essential for scaling faster software delivery.

According to Red Hat, 67% of IT organizations now offer developers self-service capabilities to spin up environments on demand. Orchestration makes this achievable.

6. Embeds Security and Compliance Controls

Rather than an afterthought, orchestration bakes security and compliance into the pipeline. Pre-defined controls, approvals and validations can be inserted across the toolchain.

Security scanning, license checks, penetration tests and other safeguards execute at each stage to prevent risks from progressing downstream. Detailed audit trails demonstrate compliance.

A recent survey showed 51% of developers ignore security when pressured to release features quickly. Orchestration proactively enforces secure DevOps.

7. Boosts Engineer Productivity and Innovation

By reducing tedious toil, orchestration enables team members to focus their creative efforts on delivering more business value. Less time spent on manual tasks leads to higher feature throughput.

Developers regain time spent fixing environment issues to build new capabilities. Freed from deployment drudgery, ops engineers can architect infrastructure for scale and redundancy.

Studies show 50-70% of a typical workday is spent on mundane tasks like monitoring and environment maintenance. Orchestration alleviates this burden.

8. Enables Data-Driven Process Improvement

Mature orchestration platforms provide valuable data into pipeline performance and release quality. Organizations leverage these insights to continuously improve processes over time.

Integrations with notification tools ensure teams are alerted to pipeline failures or anomalies as they occur. Shared visibility drives collaborative root cause analysis and corrective actions.

According to recent research, data-driven organizations are 9x more likely to exhibit high performance. Orchestration delivers the data to inform DevOps evolution.

Overcoming Legacy Constraints

Transitioning to orchestrated DevOps can seem daunting for teams relying on entrenched legacy systems and processes. Fortunately, incremental steps can be taken to gradually implement orchestration capabilities:

  • Start by identifying the highest friction manual hand-offs and gaps in visibility
  • Pilot orchestration on a subset of the pipeline e.g. integration and delivery
  • Monitor results closely and showcase benefits to stakeholders
  • Incrementally broaden scope once initial ROI is demonstrated
  • Develop internal talent and best practices around orchestrated toolchain management

With an incremental roadmap aligned to business priorities, organizations can steadily evolve legacy pipelines.

Boosting Innovation and Speed Across Applications

The benefits of orchestration apply broadly for organizations building cloud-native, mobile and web applications. Key capabilities like automated environment provisioning, deployment scheduling and test case parallelization translate across technology stacks.

For cloud-native apps, orchestration is imperative to coordinate complex Kubernetes deployments across clusters. Pre-built CI/CD automation frees developers to rapidly iterate.

For mobile apps, orchestration enables easier simulation across vast device matrixes. Automated build distribution facilitates beta testing by real users.

For web apps, orchestration empowers shift left testing and consumer-driven development. Production telemetry coupled with rapid release automation powers experimentation.

Are You Ready to Orchestrate Faster Delivery?

As competitive pressures mount, organizations need the rapid innovation velocity enabled by streamlined orchestration. To learn more about scaling DevOps throughput with release orchestration, leverage our team‘s decade of expertise:

Additional Resources