DIVE INTO “DevOps”

DIVE INTO “DevOps”

WHAT IS DEVOPS?

DevOps is a term that refers to the integration of software developers (dev) and operations (ops) (ops). It’s a software engineering methodology that tries to combine the activities of software development and software operations teams by encouraging collaboration and shared responsibility.

If the question is “What does DevOps imply for organisations?”, the answer is simple, DevOps allows previously compartmentalised disciplines – development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security – to interact and coordinate to create better, more reliable products. Teams may better respond to customer requests, boost confidence in the apps they produce, and achieve business goals faster by adopting a DevOps culture and using DevOps principles and tools.

Human silos are broken down by DevOps, and an open DevOps platform does the same for technologies. Many teams begin their DevOps journey with a jumble of tools that must all be maintained and many of which do not or cannot integrate. An open DevOps platform combines tools into a single application, allowing for unprecedented collaboration, visibility, and development speed. Modern software should be built, secured, released, and monitored in a repeatable manner using an open DevOps framework. Because everyone can contribute, a genuinely “open” DevOps platform allows teams to iterate faster and innovate collectively.

WHY DEVOPS!

DevOps is a method for bringing together development and operations teams in a company. It also alters the way the two teams approach their respective tasks. DevOps isn’t only a process or all about the tools, contrary to popular opinion. DevOps is a concept and a culture that alters the way different teams in an organisation collaborate to achieve business objectives. Tools and processes are the only things that keep it going.

DevOps has a slew of advantages. This article discusses some of the most significant DevOps advantages and how they can improve your business procedures. Some of them are,

1.  Speed:

One of the intrinsic benefits of DevOps is that it speeds up the rate at which your company operates. The faster you deliver exceptional software, the sooner you can capitalise on the features’ business value. The length of time it takes to test a product is determined by the availability of a testing environment.

Due to the presence of a test environment, testing time for software updates/upgrades is usually rather quick. However, because the operations team must set up a test environment, testing a new product takes a long time. Through automated testing and integration, DevOps accelerates the delivery of software features and adjustments.

2. Agility:

Customers today have high expectations in terms of product complexity and delivery time. Enterprises must incorporate agility into their processes to fight such difficulties and stay ahead of the competition. Agility is more of an umbrella phrase in this context, encompassing a wide range of sophisticated capabilities. DevOps checks all of the boxes that are commonly thought to be subsets of agility, allowing firms to become more agile. DevOps approaches, for example, enable a company to be adaptable when it comes to balancing capacity in response to demand changes.

3. Reliability:

Another crucial takeaway from a solid DevOps methodology is service reliability. Simply put, reliability refers to a system’s capacity to operate consistently within its environmental limits. DevOps adoption enhances service dependability by increasing the availability and connection of services required for a business’s smooth operation.

4. Customer Satisfaction:

Customer happiness is a factor that can make or ruin your company. It’s critical for your company to succeed since acquiring new customers is much more expensive than retaining existing consumers by improving customer satisfaction. Thankfully, one of the key benefits of DevOps is improved customer experience—and, as a result, customer happiness.

5. Quality:

For obvious reasons, the quality of your software is critical, and DevOps may assist you in maximising that quality. DevOps alters the way companies conduct traditional software testing. It elevates testing to a fundamental component of the SDLC, delegating responsibilities to all engineers involved. It encourages exploratory testing, which can improve software quality by identifying effective techniques to test various elements of completed software.

6.Innovation:

The key to unlocking software development innovation is DevOps. We’ve seen how DevOps enables you to quickly deploy software solutions. Rapid software delivery frees up part of your developers’ time, allowing them to experiment with new features or improve the effectiveness of the ones they already have. Developers can test the feasibility of such concepts by doing a proof of concept and progressing based on the findings with minimal disruption to the current project.

DEVOPS LIFE CYCLE:

DevOps is most commonly used in e-commerce websites, cloud-native applications, and other big distributed systems. The DevOps lifecycle is made up of seven distinct phases.

These seven phases are the most important factors in ensuring that DevOps optimises all development processes, from proposal to production and delivery. The DevOps lifecycle is broken down into phases and analysed in detail.

1. Continuous Development
2. Continuous Integration
3. Continuous Testing 
4. Continuous Feedback
5. Continuous Monitoring
6. Continuous Deployment
7. Continuous Operations

Let’s get to know about these 7 phases,

1.  Continuous development:

The iterative process of producing software to be provided to clients is referred to as continuous development. Continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment are all part of the process. Businesses can accomplish faster delivery of new features or products that are of higher quality and lower risk by executing a continuous development strategy and its accompanying sub-strategies, without running into substantial bandwidth restrictions.

2. Continuous Integration:

 Continuous integration (CI) is a software development technique that is frequently used in the DevOps process flow. Developers merge their code changes into a shared repository on a regular basis, and the updates are tested automatically. Continuous integration ensures that developers always have access to the most up-to-date and approved code. CI helps avoid costly development delays by allowing several developers to confidently work on the same source code, rather than waiting until release day to integrate various pieces of code all at once. This procedure is an important part of the DevOps process flow, which strives to combine speed, agility, and security.

3. Continuous Testing:

Prior to the continuous integration phase, some developers perform continuous testing. This phase can be relocated around the continuous integration phase in the DevOps lifecycle based on changes in the application code. Here, the software is thoroughly checked for faults on a regular basis. With the help of Docker containers, a test environment is created. Developers can save time and effort by using automated testing instead of manual testing. The test evaluation process is aided by reports generated by automated testing. It becomes simple to examine the failed test cases. The completed test-suite is simpler and bug-free after undergoing a UAT (User Acceptance Testing) process.  

4. Continuous Feedback:

The two critical processes that ensure consistent improvements in the application code are continuous testing and continuous integration. Continuous feedback is a unique phase in which these advancements are assessed. Developers can predict how these changes will affect the final output. Customers that tested these applications can share their experiences at this phase, which is especially significant. This stage of the DevOps lifecycle, in the vast majority of situations, marks a turning point in the application development process. The feedback is quickly evaluated, and engineers get to work on the new changes. Sooner or later, positive client feedback emerges, paving the path for the release of new versions of software applications.

5. Continuous Monitoring:

For application developers, monitoring the performance of an application is critical. During this phase, developers collect data on how the app is used and regularly monitor each feature. During this phase, common system issues such as “server not reachable” and “low memory” are handled. Continuous monitoring aids in maintaining the application’s service availability. It also identifies the dangers and reasons of recurrent system faults. Security issues are rectified, and faults are discovered and repaired automatically.

The IT operations teams are more involved in this phase than the software development teams.

6. Continuous Deployment :

Traditionally, continuous deployment comes first, followed by continuous monitoring. Developers, on the other hand, make sure that this phase is always active in the DevOps lifecycle, especially once the application is live and receiving a lot of traffic.

The finalised application code is delivered to the production servers in this step. The accurate deployment of application code on all servers is carried out by Configuration Management, which is a vital procedure in this phase. The application’s performance and functional conditions are created and curates for consistency. Server code is issued, upgrades are planned for all servers, and these configurations are maintained over time.

7.  Continuous Operations :

In a production environment, the operations phase entails maintaining, monitoring, and debugging applications. Teams that use DevOps principles strive for system stability, high availability, and minimal downtime while also ensuring security and governance. DevOps teams strive to discover issues before they have an impact on the customer experience and to promptly resolve them when they do. Rich telemetry, actionable alerting, and full visibility into apps and the underlying system are all required to maintain this vigilance.

DEVOPS FUNDAMENTALS:

Across the application lifecycle, DevOps encompasses a wide range of approaches. Customers begin their journey to DevOps success with one or more of these approaches.

• Continuous Integration (CI): Teams looking for ways to automate the build and testing processes so that they can reliably integrate code and test it continually, reducing the amount of time they spend manually running unit and integration tests.
• Continuous Delivery (CD): Teams seeking for solutions to automate application construction, testing, packaging, setup, and deployment to a target environment.
• Shift Security: Teams looking for approaches to identify vulnerabilities during development and provide actionable information to developers so they can remediate vulnerabilities early in the lifecycle have defined goals and must satisfy particular success criteria by a certain date.
• Source code management: Teams seeking better ways to manage changes to documents, software, photos, huge web sites, and other collections of code, configuration, and metadata among separate teams.
• Agile Project & Portfolio Management: Teams seeking for a more efficient means of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing a team’s work in order to fulfil certain goals and deadlines.

DEVOPS TOOLS:

Even though DevOps is as much a mindset as it is a method, there are still a lot of moving components to keep care of. Consider using these DevOps tools to keep on track while you transition your operations to a DevOps environment.

There are many tools used in this DevOps some of them are,

• Gradle: Gradle is an open source build automation tool for automating the development, testing, and deployment of application code. You may automate actions with build.gradle scripts, such as copying files from one location to another before the build ever starts. Gradle was created using the same principles as Apache Ant and Apache Maven. Gradle employs a Groovy-based domain-specific language instead of XML (like Maven does) (DSL).
• Lucidchart: Lucidchart is a visual workspace that enables developers and IT administrators to generate robust, simple diagrams of processes, teams, and data. You may use Lucidchart as a DevOps tool to train team members, document handoffs, track ongoing development progress, and keep everyone on the same page by modelling your new DevOps process flow in Lucidchart.
• Kubernetes: Group containers into logical units, deploy in clusters, and automate distribution and scheduling to take containerization to the next level. Kubernetes is a well-known open-source technology and DevOps platform that enables teams to scale their projects.
• Git: Git is a DevOps technology for managing distributed source code that allows you to track your development progress. Use features like branching, staging regions, and different workflow choices to easily save or revert to different versions of your source code.

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Issues with DevOps:

1. Integrating Domain-Specific Tools: We all know that continuous integration is one of the key pillars of DevOps, thus we need to correctly integrate all of the tools to ensure that testing, deployment, and building all run in parallel. The main challenge is figuring out how to combine all of the tools so that everyone can work together.

• Dev and Ops Teams Having Their Own Toolsets: The disparity in toolkits between development and operations teams is one of the most difficult aspects of DevOps implementation. The most important component of making things operate properly is identifying and syncing any differences between the two.

• Adoption of New tools: The DevOps toolset’s new tools appear to be capable of solving any problem. Even if we have all the tools, we must instruct our employees on how to use them properly. Another important consideration is that these tools must meet security criteria and be properly integrated into the existing infrastructure. These factors have the potential to lead the company astray from a crucial priority.

• Change Is Resisted: A majority of team members and key stakeholders may be apprehensive about the DevOps transition. Telling individuals they need to change might be seen as a negative reflection on the person getting the advice. The transition to DevOps will not be abrupt; it will be incremental and fluid. It will allow everyone to gradually become a part of the DevOps culture while also learning about the various ways they may contribute to the development process.

Solution:

• Analytics: Integration technologies are normally responsible for gathering important data and storing it in a single location. The integration tools will assist in the generation of meaningful reports from the acquired data with the help of these specific characteristics. As a result, data will provide us with a variety of benefits, including training information, work schedules, and a better knowledge of crucial business concerns, among others.

• Good Advice: The remedy is good management. The best results will come from clear directions and clear communication. Employees at a company should also be aware of the organization’s goals and how to attain them. Proper supervision and training are required to obtain this information.

• Improved collaboration: DevOps teams will be more productive as a result of improved collaboration. Instead of focusing on separate projects, they might collaborate on a single aim. This collaboration will also increase visibility, making it easier to track changes across teams.

• Providing a Framework at the Enterprise Level: The challenge of tool integration will be solved by determining the optimum orchestration option. There are numerous products on the market that automate tool environments to provide enterprise-level architecture. These tools will offer some benefits.

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Conclusion:

The technological as well as business benefits of DevOps can be inferred from this information. To recap, a well-thought-out DevOps strategy and implementation can significantly improve the efficiency of your end-to-end delivery pipeline. It starts with basic software quality and extends to include user feedback loops to ensure that your products meet the needs and expectations of your customers. Naturally, you’ll meet numerous obstacles along the way, like employee attitude barriers and general aversion to change, to mention a few. However, after you’ve conquered those first hurdles, DevOps will completely transform the way your company runs. if you want to know more about this or need help, any type of issues related to hardware and software issues with the system, their team of ““Computer Repair Onsite (CROS)” will always be there for us and also to resolve. You can easily get their help from their user friendly website here.