Welcome back to our Introduction to DevOps course. I'm Ben Lambert, and I'll be your instructor for this lecture.

In this lecture, we're going to talk about how DevOps can reduce operational costs. As with the previous two lectures, we'll view our Acme Products Unlimited scenario through the lens of reduced operational cost. Now, because we've already covered improved lead time and stability, there won't be much left to say about our scenario, though for completeness, I wanted to make sure it was covered.

Before we get into our imaginary company's problems, let's talk about your company. How much would an hour of downtime for your app, site or service cost your company? If we were talking about Amazon, then we could be talking about millions per hour, and the same is probably true for payment companies like PayPal or Stripe.

So, outages nowadays can become very costly. If the availability of your services impacts your bottom line, then you need to ensure that those services are as stable as possible. We talked about stability in the previous lecture. We talked about how a DevOps plan can improve stability.
But there are other considerations when thinking about outages that are less quantifiable, one being public perception of your product. If your service has a history of outages, people may jump to a competitor's product that may be more stable. Quantifying the value of your public image is more difficult, but outages and security issues will all have an impact on it.

Okay. Let's get a brief overview of how Acme Products Unlimited improved operational costs.

First, they made a much more stable product, starting with improved code quality and going all the way through its operations, which as we mentioned, can improve operational costs.

Second, they improved their lead time by implementing a system that allows for multiple deploys per day, thus making it easier to get features into production. If your users have to wait too long for the features they want, they may start looking at competitors.

Third, they reduced the amount of time that engineers spent on unplanned work, allowing for the vast majority of time to be spent adding value to the software.

Lastly, they reduced, or at least should have reduced the amount of stress that engineers were under, while they were trying to put out fires all day and get work done. The result should be lower turnover rates.

This is a pretty succinct list, however, between better stability, faster lead times, reduction of unplanned work, and happier engineers, it all adds up to improved operational cost.

In our next lecture, we're going to review a few companies that are well known in the community for their successful DevOps practices, so you'll actually be able to see some real world examples. Okay. Let's get started.