What is DevOps?
DevOps is the umbrella term for a collection of techniques, methodologies, and tools. This model improves an organisation’s capacity to deliver applications and services quickly. Because of this speed, organisations can provide better customer service and engage in competition.
In simple terms, DevOps combines people, processes, and technology in application design, development, delivery, and operations by combining development (Dev) and procedures (Ops). DevOps allows formerly separate tasks like development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security to coordinate and collaborate.
DevOps and the application lifecycle
DevOps impacts the application lifecycle’s planning, development, delivery, and operations phases. The phases are not role-specific, and each depends on the others. All positions play some part in each step of a DevOps culture.
Planning During the planning stage, DevOps teams conceptualise, define, and characterise the characteristics and capabilities of the applications and systems they aim to construct. Teams monitor task progress at low and high granularity levels, from single products to numerous product portfolios. The following DevOps approaches are used by teams to schedule with agility and visibility.
- Make a backlog.
- Monitor bugs.
- Utilise Scrum to oversee Agile software development.
- Implement Kanban boards.
- Utilise dashboards to see progress.
- Development
The entire process of writing software code is covered in the development phase. DevOps teams perform the following responsibilities at this phase.
- Pick a setting for development.
- Code must be written, tested, reviewed, and integrated.
- Create artifacts from the code to deploy them in different locations.
- To work concurrently and collaboratively on code, use version control, typically Git.
Delivery
The act of routinely and reliably deploying software into production environments is known as delivery, and continuous delivery is the optimum method (CD). DevOps teams do the following throughout the delivery phase.
The act of routinely and reliably deploying software into production environments is known as delivery, and continuous delivery is the optimum method (CD).
DevOps teams do the following throughout the delivery phase.
- Establish a release management procedure that includes distinct manual approval stages.
- Install automatic gates to move applications through various stages before releasing them to clients.
- To make delivery procedures scalable, repeatable, controllable, and thoroughly tested, automate them.
- Operations
In the operations phase, applications in production environments-including hybrid or public clouds like Azure, are maintained, watched over, and troubled shot. DevOps teams aim for system stability, high availability, security, and zero downtime.
How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps is centred on development and operations. These two teams work closely together, and software-related processes are created equally with both teams in mind. Building an effective pipeline is necessary for DevOps implementation. This cycle includes all the required capabilities for the delivery process, from planning to release.
DevOps Best Practices
- Build a collaborative culture
DevOps aims to improve communication and break down barriers between teams working on development, operations, and quality assurance. This way, users can speed up the software development and client delivery processes. To reach this level of collaboration, the entire engineering team’s mentality and perspective must change, and there must be a common aim or set of goals. To achieve customer expectations, software developers and operations engineers must jointly control the software development process. Regardless of their team positions, everyone’s responsibilities in DevOps include development and operations.
- Put customer satisfaction first.
The objective is to meet client expectations. You can accelerate the release process with DevOps. The individuals who write new code and manage code releases make it simpler to deliver new functionality to customers.
- Adopt continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)
A fundamental DevOps best practice called continuous integration (CI) is used to incorporate code modifications made by several contributors into a single repository. With automated technologies, developers may swiftly merge code modifications thanks to CI.
Continuous delivery (CDCD) picks up where continuous integration (CI) leaves off. A DevOps technique known as continuous delivery pushes the code from continuous integration into production. Software deployments become simple, low-risk activities that can be carried out anytime with continuous delivery.
- Monitor the right metrics.
One DevOps best practice is continuous performance monitoring. The effectiveness of a DevOps methodology can only be assessed by monitoring the appropriate performance indicators, such as lead time, mean time to detect, and issue severity. Monitoring these indicators is crucial since it enables you to spot issues early and act quickly to fix them. The DevOps metrics will depend on the objectives and standards of your firm. Any engineering team can benefit from some indicators, like unit cost.
- Use the right tools.
The key to a successful DevOps practice is automation. The life of developers and operations engineers who work together in a DevOps organisation is made more accessible by automating the process of creating, testing, and delivering software. Whether it’s a tool that monitors your performance metrics, issues alert when anything goes wrong or offers general visibility into the development of your software; you’ll need access to DevOps tools to help you do this.
Figure 04: Benefits of DevOps
- Speed: You can develop for clients more quickly, adjust to shifting markets, and become more effective at generating business results.
- Rapid Delivery: Increase release frequency and speed to create and enhance your product more quickly. You may respond to client requests and gain a competitive edge more rapidly by releasing new features and fixing bugs. The entire software release cycle, from development to deployment, is automated by continuous integration and delivery techniques.
- Reliability: To provide consistently at a faster rate while maintaining a solid end-user experience, Ensure the calibre of infrastructure updates and application updates. Test each change to ensure it is secure and functional using continuous integration and delivery techniques. You can keep up with real-time performance with monitoring and logging procedures.
- Security: Move swiftly while maintaining compliance and control. You may implement a DevOps paradigm without compromising safety by utilising configuration management methods, automated compliance regulations, and fine-grained controls. You can establish and then track compliance at scale, for instance, using infrastructure as code and policy as code.
