Continuous Software Deployment for Cost Optimization
Why Does Software Deployment Cost So Much?
Software deployment is the stage in the software development life cycle where the application is made available to the intended users. So why is software deployment so expensive? Let’s consider the full development life cycle to help understand the total cost of software development and where deployment costs fit.
The full software development life cycle includes these stages:
- Planning
- Design and Prototyping
- Development
- Testing
- Deployment
- Maintenance
Sometimes these stages are manual, sometimes automated, and sometimes a combination. Each stage represents an investment from the business, whether it’s an investment in people costs, specialty consultation, developer time, infrastructure, slow time to market, or other costs.
Software deployment costs are sometimes referred to as: delivery cost, cost of development, upfront cost, or build cost. But if we think of deployment as one distinct step in the life cycle, it comes with its own set of costs and risks.
The Costs of an Unsuccessful Software Deployment
The development and release costs really start to hurt if a project fails and doesn’t get deployed at all. If you aren’t able to successfully deploy your software, that’s a lot of wasted time and money spent throughout the entirety of the life cycle.
If your project does get deployed poorly, then your help desk starts getting escalations. Your software team has to jump onto calls to fix critical issues. Even more time might be needed to fully correct the failure, leading to even more development, testing, and deployment costs.
The worst cost of all is if the software deployment process is so bad that it hurts your customers and therefore your reputation. Hurting your customers means you could lose their trust or even their business.
The Hidden Costs of Custom Software Deployment
Businesses sometimes underestimate the total cost of custom software deployment. They may assume that the majority of costs come from development. However, the costs don’t stop when the software is developed; it should always be viewed as an ongoing process, which means it needs ongoing time and investment.
If you’re looking to create custom deployment solutions in-house, prepare for these possible inevitabilities (and expenses):
- Code deployments take too long
- Development costs start to increase
- Infrastructure costs add up
- Poor security and vulnerable pipelines
There’s a correlation between delivery and deployment speed and stability. According to the 2022 State of Continuous Delivery Report from the Continuous Delivery Foundation:
Over half of developers for whom it takes more than one month to commit code changes also perform poorly in restoring service, taking more than one week. By contrast, less than 10% of high performers in software delivery speed are low performers in stability.
Similarly, nearly a third of top performers in lead time for code changes excel in time to restore service. In comparison, only 5% of low performers in software delivery throughout are top performers in stability.
The Solution: Streamline Software Deployment Costs
To improve the cost of software deployment, consider moving to an automated continuous deployment model that aligns with good continuous delivery practices. Continuous software deployment that is quick, secure, and reliable saves time, prevents hidden costs like poor security, offers options for quick and accurate rollbacks, and helps with long-term development costs.
To achieve these savings, deployment pipelines need to be smart and automated, not rely on people or custom scripts. These pipelines should automate testing, governance, deployment, verification, and rollbacks reliably, with the ability to scale along with your team, organization, and needs. With the right tooling, developers can deploy on demand, and pipelines are streamlined so new artifacts can be pushed to production quickly, securely, and reliably.
See how Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service can affordably improve your software deployment.
LaunchDarkly boosted deployment frequency by 1475% and DevOps capacity by 250% with Armory Continuous Deployment and AWS
How to Save Costs with Continuous Deployment
A solid step toward saving software development costs is to assess your deployment strategy. Start finding out the answers to these questions: Are you automating the development and delivery process, and yet doing manual deployments? How many environments are you trying to deploy to? Which teams use which deployment types across your organization?
Assess the risks if any of your deployment pipelines fail. Finally, calculate how much developer and customer success time, software development budget, and customer trust you will lose if you don’t have a reliable deployment strategy in place.
The next way to start saving money is to ensure you’re using a continuous deployment tool that integrates with your software development workflow. It should help you with automated testing, deployments, and rollbacks across your environment, without wasting time building custom deployment code in-house. That will save money in developer time, as well as increase your delivery speed so you can reach customers faster.
What are the Cost-Saving Benefits of Continuous Deployment?
Continuous deployment can provide cost savings through:
- Complementing a good software delivery process to save engineering time
- Automating manual processes and removing the need for in-house coding
- Ensuring software is deployed quickly, reliably, and securely
- Helping your software get to market faster, reach your customers faster, and start delivering value
- Rollbacks that are fast and accurate, helping minimize customer dissatisfaction
Who Benefits from Software Deployment Cost Savings?
Software Engineers – Software development teams that streamline the process of building, testing and deploying new code are able to develop, release, and move quickly. They can better respond to customer and market demands with continuous updates and fresh features more frequently.
Customer Success – The customer-facing teams have to worry less about successful code deployments and more about driving customer satisfaction, creating stronger partnerships, and generating more revenue.
Summary
Software development can be expensive. But new tools and processes are making it easier to automate the life cycle from development to testing to deployment. Continuous deployment helps with software costs by ensuring that your software is deployed safely, reliably, and quickly every time.
Cut down on manual deployment scripts, flaky in-house code, and slow deployment times. Continuous Deployment-as-a-Service can boost your software deployments without boosting costs.
Commit. Deploy. Repeat.
Continuous Deployment at any scale, for all developers.