What is DevOps?

DevOps (a combination of the terms "development" and "operations") is the mix of methods and technologies aimed at boosting a company's capacity to produce applications and services more quickly than using typical software development procedures. The DevOps platform is used to build, secure, release, and monitor contemporary software in a repeatable manner.

In its most basic form, it refers to the practice of reducing boundaries between previously segmented teams, such as development and operations. When using a DevOps approach, development and operations teams collaborate across the whole software application life cycle, from the initial stages of creation and testing, through deployment and operations.

This phrase also embraces changes in culture, including the establishment of trust and cooperation between system administrators and software developers, as well as the synchronization of technology initiatives with the needs of businesses. The software supply chain has the potential to be revolutionized, as well as services, job roles, IT tools, and industry standards. This method helps businesses better serve their clients and compete in the marketplace.

This article provides a detailed explanation of what DevOps is, how it works, the DevOps lifecycle, its key elements, and best practices.

How Does it Work?

DevOps is a way of doing things that are meant to make things better all the way through the software development lifecycle.

A DevOps team is a team that works together to increase the speed and quality of software installation. This team is composed of developers and IT operations workers that work together throughout the product life cycle. This process can be thought of as an endless loop with the following steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor, and feedback plan, which starts the loop over again.

DevOps implies that an IT team builds software that satisfies user needs, installs quickly, and operates well on the first attempt. Developers and stakeholders discuss the project and provide modest changes to match the software with expectations.

IT teams employ CI/CD pipelines and other forms of automation to transfer code from one phase of development and deployment to the next. Teams can instantly evaluate modifications and enforce regulations to ensure that releases follow quality requirements.

DevOps teams employ tools to automate and speed up procedures, improving reliability. The essential DevOps fundamentals of continuous integration and delivery, automation, and communication may be more easily addressed by teams with the help of a DevOps toolchain.

Values associated with DevOps are sometimes applied to teams that are not involved in development. Securing software is now an active and integral part of the development process when security teams adopt DevOps. The term for this practice is "DevSecOps."

DevOps Lifecycle: The Four Phases of DevOps

Because DevOps is a continuous process, the infinity loop is used to show how the different stages of the DevOps lifecycle are related to each other. Even though it seems to move in a straight line, the loop represents the need for collaboration and improvement throughout the whole lifecycle.

The DevOps lifecycle improves development processes from beginning to end and gets the whole organization involved in continuous development, which speeds up the time it takes to deliver software. This process is mostly made up of seven stages. Let's take a quick look at how these main four stages of the DevOps lifecycle work.

Continuous Development & Continuous Exploration

Planning and writing code are both parts of continuous development. Here, the whole process of making something is broken up into smaller steps. This makes it easier for the DevOps team to speed up the whole process of making software. This phase is important because it helps developers map out their vision for the whole development cycle and understand what is expected of them. This helps the team start to see what its end goal is. No DevOps tools are needed for planning, but there are a lot of version control tools used to keep code up to date.

Through continuous exploration practices, teams can give each other honest feedback and measure their performance against the industry standard. It is an extension of the lean startup method, which recognizes that problems often come from trying too hard for too long and encourages teams to look back, learn from their mistakes, and get better with each project. For a business to be agile, decision-makers need to be well-informed enough to know when to keep going and when to change directions. They also need to be able to change directions quickly when needed. The former is made possible by ongoing exploration. If teams do well in this phase, they will be able to figure out which ideas will work and what their goals are.

Continuous Integration

DevOps teams keep integrating components, systems, and solutions by using a prioritized backlog that comes from continuous exploration. This is the building phase, and it is owned by the developer. As much as possible should be automated, and the process of committing, containerizing, testing, and deploying code should take no more than a few minutes. Continuous integration includes the development, building, testing, and staging of features. Continuous Testing & Continuous Deployment

Some teams do the continuous testing phase before the integration, while others do it after the integration. During this stage, Docker containers are used by quality analysts to test the software for bugs and problems all the time. If there is a bug or mistake, the code goes back to the integration phase to be fixed. Automation testing also cuts down on the amount of time and work needed to get good results. Continuous testing also improves the test evaluation report and cuts down on the cost of setting up and maintaining test environments.

Continuous deployment (CD) provides easy product deployment without compromising application performance. During this step, it is critical to guarantee that the code is exactly distributed on all accessible servers. This technique reduces the requirement for planned releases while also speeding up the feedback system, enabling developers to address problems more quickly and accurately.

Continuous Feedback & Continuous Operation

Continuous feedback is needed to determine and examine application results. It lays the stage for updating the current version depending on stakeholder input. Analyzing software operation outcomes helps enhance app development overall. Feedback is client-provided information. Information is important since it contains data regarding program performance and faults. It includes user recommendations.

Continuous operations are the simplest to comprehend and crucial for reducing scheduled downtime in DevOps. When it comes to DevOps, consistency is key to automating release processes, detecting problems as soon as they arise, and creating better versions of software products. It is essential to keep moving forward to avoid detours and other unnecessary steps. Product development cycles in continuous operations tend to be shorter, which means that firms can sell their products more quickly. Software solutions that have been improved and made more efficient via the use of DevOps attract additional customers.

What Is a DevOps Example?

Let’s suppose a corporation is working on an eCommerce platform. For this, they have employed three developers to construct the application and three engineers to manage the operations, such as maintaining the infrastructure and production environment and giving support to the end-user.

After the week, the four developers working on the first module would combine their week's work to integrate their programs manually and then test what they had developed. On their test server, they will run the code once more to make sure that everything is working properly.

Unless the current module is fixed first, they can't go to the next module until they've completed it. If they don't fix these flaws now, they'll have to wait for the full cycle to complete and can only make improvements in the next release. There's no other option.

Let's assume the Development team develops an eCommerce website six months later. This covers the development and basic application testing on their local system to validate client formation, order placement, order and payment procedures, etc. The developer team gives its code to the operation team, which releases the software for commercial usage.

Here, the problem starts. The flawless eCommerce app is really not perfect. The operations team discovers that the six-month-long program can not generate customers effectively, files are missing, validation errors show up out of nowhere, and order payments aren't handled.

After six months, the development team is outraged since everything worked properly during controlled testing, thus the mess must be caused by poor execution.

They'll need months to fix all the errors and release the next version. All of these issues might have been avoided if the company adopted the DevOps method.

What Is One Key Purpose of DevOps?

DevOps was formed in reaction to challenges that arose as a result of long-standing workplace norms of having siloed or fully separated teams for development, testing, and operations for a particular product.

This segmented organization isn't always efficient, since each team has its own set of goals, responsibilities, and timetables that don't always correspond with those of the surrounding teams. The one key purpose of DevOps is to make the development cycle more coherent.

Those many teams are combined into a single team using a DevOps strategy. Testing may occur automatically and often throughout the product development process, and all groups may be engaged in long-term maintenance.

A DevOps culture also improves team efficiency, release speed, and feedback channels.

What Are the Benefits of DevOps?

By automating and streamlining the software development management process, there are a few key practices that can help organizations come up with new ideas faster. One of the most important parts of DevOps is making small updates very often. Most of the time, these updates are smaller than the updates done with traditional release practices. Organizations that use the DevOps model update their software much more often than those that use traditional software development methods.

DevOps techniques emphasize communication and cooperation. Automation of the software delivery process establishes collaboration by bringing development and operations workflows together. Developers, operations, and even marketing and sales may better align on objectives and projects via communication.

The following is a list of some of the other important advantages of the DevOps lifecycle:

• The DevOps lifecycle is a helpful strategy that leads developers and IT operations experts through the complicated procedure of app building.
• Increased profitability is a natural consequence of improved operational efficiency.
• DevOps practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery help teams produce quickly, securely, and reliably. It is widely utilized by big as well as small teams, and it may assist them in organizing, aligning, and tracking stages in the life cycle.
• Monitoring and logging assist DevOps teams to monitor app performance so they can respond fast to issues.
• The early detection and correction of defects are made easier for developers by automatic monitoring and testing as well as release.
• DevOps developers can learn more about their products and enhance the quality of their code since there are several automated techniques for gathering input.

What Are the Challenges of Adopting DevOps?

It can be hard to change old habits and traditions in a workplace. Teams that are ingrained in the habit of working in silos may have difficulty or even be reluctant to reorganize their team structures to adopt the concepts of DevOps. It's possible that some teams would incorrectly feel that new technologies are all they need to implement DevOps. DevOps, on the other hand, is a mixture of people, tools, and a certain culture. Everyone on a DevOps team has to have a comprehensive understanding of the whole value stream, which runs from ideation through development to the experience provided to the end user. In order to interact throughout the product life cycle, it is necessary to tear down the silos that have been established.

There are some other problems with DevOps:

• Changes in the IT department and organization, such as new skills and jobs
• Expensive platforms and tools, as well as training and help to use them well
• Development and the disperse of IT tools
• Scaling DevOps across many teams and projects
• More risky deployments because of a fail-fast mentality and doing more general jobs instead of specializing
• Compliance with regulations, especially when role separation is needed

DevOps Tools

Using the right tools is crucial to effective DevOps deployment, but it doesn't guarantee success. Tools are only useful when a business has embraced DevOps and is committed to implementing its best practices.

Tools to make project workflow easy and productive:

• Jenkins
• Travis
• GitLab CI
• TeamCity
• Bamboo

Configuration management tools make production deployments seamless and consistent:

• Chef
• Docker
• Ansible
• Puppet

DevOps Tools to make the continuous monitoring process simple and quick:

• Nagios
• Kibana
• Splunk
• New Relic
• Sensu

Cloud Automation DevOps

The goal of the first development of DevOps was to shorten the total duration of the software development lifecycle by establishing a culture of collaboration between two different teams (software development and IT operations). The field of DevOps relies heavily on automation as an essential component. The use of automation and DevOps helps to cut down on manual work and ensures consistency across routine, labor-intensive activities. This covers automating procedures such as provisioning, continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD), as well as scaling infrastructures.

The cloud is increasingly becoming the focus of automation within DevOps. The vast majority of suppliers of cloud computing services, both public and private, provide support for DevOps on their platforms, including continuous integration and continuous development tools.

Does DevOps Need Coding?

Knowledge in coding is often required to work on a DevOps team. However, this does not imply that every member of the team is required to have prior experience in coding. The power of a team is in the way in which its members work together to use their diverse skill sets. This is true not just for DevOps teams but also for every other kind of team.

It's important to know what skills are needed and how they fit together. So, it is not important to know how to code, but it is a necessity to know what coding is, how it works, and why it's important.

Future of DevOps

The future of DevOps seems quite bright, and a growing number of businesses are likely to adopt this method soon. As it is no longer a specialist practice, it is expected to play a significant role in corporate IT departments in the future. It is still a major global movement that digital and IT leaders are very interested in. In the future years, DevOps will continue to develop as organizations find new IT difficulties that need to be handled. In particular, these companies will seek automation to streamline or even eliminate procedures that get in the way of business agility. This will cause DevOps to continue its evolution.

Forrester's "Future of DevOps" research for 2022, published in June, states:

“DevOps has become the default approach for most software-intensive organizations and is having an increasing effect on enterprise IT operating models. Unlike many flash-in-the-pan, hype-driven trends in IT, DevOps has made a real and sustained impact. It continues to transform how organizations of all sizes write, deploy, and operate software and produce digital value.”

Summing Up

DevOps has unquestionably established a brand-new culture in the software development business by guaranteeing that software solutions meet the highest quality requirements. In the DevOps lifecycle, the most important objective is to maintain everything running smoothly and to optimize automation. How well the developers, testers, and operations teams work together to deliver the software product swiftly with an enhanced user experience is the key to a successful product release.

Would you like to automate your development process to expedite the delivery of business value or use a DevOps solution to improve collaboration? With maximum automation, Ronwell Digital can help you optimize your business and increase user satisfaction!