What Is DevOps?
DevOps adoption is accelerating in large corporations and web-native organisations, although there is still some ambiguity regarding what the phrase actually means. Is DevOps a movement, a philosophy, a methodology, a culture, or a combination of these? Or do various people define DevOps differently?
DevOps is a partnership between IT Operations and Development that enables automated and repeatable software development and deployment. The firm can provide software applications and services more quickly thanks to DevOps. The words “Development” and “Operations” are combined to make the full term “DevOps.”
It enables businesses to provide better customer service and engage in more robust market competition. DevOps can be summed up as an improvement in communication and collaboration between development and IT operations.
DevOps is a mindset that, in its broadest sense, encourages improved communication and collaboration between these teams and other groups within a company. DevOps refers to the use of iterative software development, automation, and programmable infrastructure deployment and maintenance in its most limited sense. The phrase also refers to cultural shifts like fostering cohesiveness and trust between developers and systems administrators and coordinating technical initiatives with organizational needs. The software delivery process, services, employment responsibilities, IT tools, and best practices can all be altered by DevOps.
Why is DevOps Needed?
- The development and operations teams operated independently before the advent of DevOps.
- Deployment and testing were separate processes carried out after design-build. As a result, they took longer than actual build cycles.
- Team members waste a lot of time testing, deploying, and planning instead of really building the project when DevOps isn’t used.
- In production, manual code deployment increases the risk of human mistake.
Further delays are brought on by the coding and operating teams’ different schedules and lack of coordination.
How does DevOps work?
To improve the pace and caliber of software deployment, a DevOps team consists of developers and IT operations personnel that collaborate throughout the product lifecycle. Teams and the organisations they work for will be significantly impacted by this new method of working, or cultural shift.
Development and operations teams are no longer “siloed” under a DevOps approach. These two teams can occasionally combine to form a single team of engineers who work across the whole application lifecycle, from development and test to deployment and operations, and who possess a variety of multidisciplinary abilities.
Tools are used by DevOps teams to automate and speed up procedures, which increases reliability. Teams can tackle crucial DevOps elements like continuous integration, continuous delivery, automation, and collaboration with the aid of a DevOps toolchain.
Sometimes teams outside of development use DevOps values. Security becomes an active and integrated element of the development process when security teams use a DevOps methodology. DevSecOps is the term for this.
The DevOps lifecycle:
DevOps is a continuous process, thus practitioners utilise the infinity loop to illustrate the relationships between the many stages of the DevOps lifecycle. The loop represents the necessity for ongoing communication and iterative development across the whole lifecycle, even though it appears to flow sequentially.
- Discover: Software development is a team sport. Teams must workshop to investigate, arrange, and rank ideas in advance of the forthcoming sprint. Ideas must deliver on customer impact and be in alignment with strategic goals. DevOps teams can be guided by agile.
Plan: Agile methodologies should be used by DevOps teams to increase efficiency and quality. Agile is an iterative project management and software development methodology that assists teams in breaking down work into smaller components and delivering value incrementally.
Build: Git is an open-source, free version control programme. It provides great branching, merging, and rewriting repository history support, which has sparked the creation of a variety of creative and effective workflows and tools for the development build process.
Test: Multiple developers can contribute to a single shared repository using continuous integration (CI). Automated tests are done prior to the integration of code changes to verify accuracy. Development teams frequently find comfort in the quality and predictability of code after merging and testing it.
Deploy: Teams can deliver features often and automatically into production using continuous deployment (CD). Teams can also choose to release new code to users gradually and deliberately rather than all at once by using feature flags. The speed, productivity, and sustainability of software development teams are all improved by this method.
Operate: oversee the complete supply of IT services to clients. This covers all procedures used in the planning, execution, configuration, deployment, and upkeep of the IT infrastructure that underpins the operations of a business.
Observe: Quickly locate and fix problems that affect the functionality, speed, and uptime of the product. Automatically alert your staff to changes, risky procedures, or failures so that you may continue to provide services.
Continuous feedback: DevOps teams ought to assess each release and produce reports to enhance subsequent releases. Teams may enhance their procedures and utilise client feedback to improve the upcoming release by collecting ongoing feedback.
DevOps Principles:
1. Customer-Centric Action: In order to invest in products and services, the DevOps team must consistently take customer-centric action.
2. End-To-End Responsibility: The DevOps team must sustain performance up until the point at which a product is considered end-of-life. This raises both the standard of accountability and the calibre of the items that are created.
3. Continuous Improvement: The DevOps culture continuously speeds up the improvement of the given products or services with an emphasis on continuous improvement to reduce waste.
4. Automate everything: The DevOps methodology places a strong emphasis on automation, which applies to both software development and the overall infrastructure landscape.
5. Work as a team: In the DevOps culture, the roles of the designer, developer, and tester are already established; all that is required of them is that they collaborate fully and work as a single team.
6. Monitor and test everything: The DevOps team needs reliable testing and monitoring techniques.
What are the benefits of DevOps?
- Speed: DevOps teams deploy products more frequently and with better stability and quality. Elite teams actually deploy 208 times more frequently and 106 times faster than low-performing teams, according to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps study. Teams can use automated technologies to create, test, and deploy software through continuous delivery.
Improved collaboration: The foundation of DevOps is a culture of collaboration between developers and operations teams, who share responsibilities and combine work. This makes teams more efficient and saves time-related to work handoffs and creating code that is designed for the environment where it runs.
Rapid deployment: DevOps teams quickly improve products by raising the frequency and velocity of releases. Release new features and problem fixes as soon as possible to obtain a competitive edge.
Quality and reliability: Practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product. Monitoring helps teams keep informed of performance in real time.
Security: DevSecOps is an active, integrated component of the development process since it incorporates security into a pipeline for continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. By incorporating active security audits and security testing into agile development and DevOps workflows, security
Benefits of a DevOps Culture:
The capacity to enhance the production environment so that software can be delivered more quickly with continuous improvement is where DevOps’s business value and benefits of a DevOps culture lie. You must be able to quickly predict and react to industry disruptors. This is made feasible by the Agile software development method, where teams are given the freedom to act independently and provide results more quickly, hence decreasing work-in-progress. Teams can then react to demands at the speed of the market after this has happened.
- Eliminate institutionalized silos and handoffs that provide obstacles and limits, especially when one team’s success metrics are at odds with the key performance indicators of another team (KPIs).
- Use a single application to provide a unified tool chain that enables sharing and collaboration amongst many teams. Teams will be able to produce projects more quickly and provide one another quick feedback as a result.
How DevOps can benefit from AI/ML?
Although the applications of AI and machine learning (ML) for DevOps are still developing, there are many advantages that organisations can use right now, such as employing the technology to interpret test results.
AI and ML may identify patterns, identify the coding errors that lead to defects, and notify DevOps teams so they can investigate further.
Similarly to this, DevOps teams may mine security data from logs and other tools using AI and ML to find breaches, attacks, and more. Once these problems are identified, AI and ML may take action using automated alerting and mitigation approaches.
By figuring out how developers and operations specialists work best, suggesting changes to processes, and automatically provisioning preferred infrastructure configurations, AI and ML may save them time.
DevOps is the Future of Enterprise IT: DevOps may be the only practical option to properly manage such heterogeneous settings given the complexity of modern enterprise systems, which keeps increasing due to the use of many technologies, databases, and end-user devices.
