DevOps is a new-age software development process where the developers and operations team work hand in glove to achieve a single business goal.
Over the years, IT markets have seen exponential growth. Adapting to changing technology with utmost flexibility is the primary reason for its rapid growth. A buzzword in the IT industry called DevOps has been roaming in the market past few years. Let’s deep dive and understand what this buzzword means and what it does not!
There is a variety of definitions and articles present on DevOps. Likely or unlikely, they all are correct. However, there is a bit of confusion left around the buzzword “DevOps.” In the first place, DevOps is a complex word that comes from two words Development and Operations. To clarify, DevOps is not a tool, software, and programming language. If not all this, then what is DevOps? DevOps combines the philosophy and mindset of projecting your product, app, or website to the end-user. DevOps is one of the best ways to take things from the development site to the production environment.
These days, all organizations are practicing the DevOps model. In this model, both the development and operations teams work in synchronization with each other. Hence, it increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at a much higher pace. Ultimately, keeping them upfront in such a competitive and volatile industry. How do DevOps works? A development team writes code, develops, and tests new features in most organizations. Similarly, an operations team manages servers, bandwidth, and security issues.
Moreover, DevOps is a concept used in the application lifecycle management process where both the development and operations team works in sync with each other. As a result of this integration, organizations can smoothly give their end-user products, applications, and services. From design and development to testing and automation, from continuous integration to the constant delivery team of DevOps engineers, handles it all to achieve the desired business goal.
Benefits of practicing DevOps:
- Speed: Adapting to the DevOps model increases pace of any organization. As a result, delivery to the customer becomes faster, adaptation to competitive changing markets becomes flexible, and the client base also increases with an increase in the number of satisfied customers.
- Reliability: Using DevOps practices such as continuous delivery, integration, and monitoring logs keep the engineers well informed about the products and services. This helps them to make real-time decisions quickly. Above all, using these practices ensures quality application delivery with the optimum end-user experience.
- Rapid Delivery: The high-velocity delivery of quality working products satisfies the competitive market and provides a first-mover advantage. It also brings good customer feedback that ensures high ROI (Return on Investment).
- Improved Collaboration: In the DevOps model, Development and Operations teams work together toward a single business goal. It enhances productivity and reduces inefficiencies. Consequently, it elevates the qualities such as communication, transparency, adaptation, and integration.
- Security: An organization can adopt DevOps without compromising on security, using automated policies, integrated testing tools, fine-grained controls, and configuration management techniques.
DevOps Practices
- Continuous Integration (CI) In DevOps, Continuous Integration is a software development practice that allows several developers to merge their code into a single central repository. This process is famous for finding bugs and getting rid of them for a smooth production environment. Some basic principles of CI are automation testing, build automation, version control, etc.
- Continuous Delivery (CD) Continuous Delivery is the software development process of automatically building, testing, configuring, and deploying the code changes for the production environment. Once the pipeline for continuous delivery is implemented, developers have a deployment-ready code that can pass through a series of standard tests. Accordingly, Fault isolation, small code changes, small backlogs are the primary benefits of continuous delivery.
- Microservices Microservices is an architectural approach for developing an application. Each feature is considered a single service and developed as a single and independent entity. All the services are loosely coupled and communicate through a well-defined channel of network and application programming interfaces (APIs). One can use a different framework programming language to write microservices and deploy them independently or as a group. Microservices architecture provides quick, recurrent, and dependable delivery of huge and compound applications. Microservices into DevOps increase the operational efficiency of both organization and application.
- Infrastructure as a Code is managing an organization’s data centers. It uses machine-readable definitions rather than a physical hardware configuration. Continuous delivery, integration, and version control systems are key techniques of practicing Infrastructure as code through DevOps. Infrastructure as a code programmatically automates the interaction of system administrators with the developers. The code defines it; therefore, it quickly deploys a standardized pattern.
Adapting Infrastructure as a code reduces cost and, most importantly, time and effort lost in configuring resources.
Hence, provide a more focused approach toward faster execution for a better end-user experience.
Infrastructure as a code has two aspects:-
- Configuration Management: Infrastructure as code and configuration management are two sides of the same coin. In particular, configuration management tools enable system administrators to define Infrastructure as a code. Both developers and system administrators use code to automate the operating systems. This helps them to get rid of the manual configuration of the OS. It also ensures hassle-free changes to the operating system into repeatable and standardized patterns.
- Policy as code: Infrastructure codified with configuration management helps in the dynamic scaling of the application. Moreover, it automatically enables tracking, validating, and reconfiguring the Infrastructure. Due to these resources, governance becomes easier with enhanced security management in a distributed manner.
- Monitoring and Logging At the DevOps level, installing a tool is insufficient. Instead, achieving the objective becomes more critical. As a result, organizations adopt continuous monitoring to check failure at various levels. In particular, monitoring helps track the system so accurately that it keeps the application in good health. Moreover, logs generated by capturing, categorizing, and analyzing applications and Infrastructure data provide good customer insights. This helps in proactively monitoring the unexpected changes throughout the application development process.
When the service becomes, 24/7 active monitoring comes into the picture, and the update frequency of the application increases.
Above all, Monitoring and logging infrastructure metrics help increase the product’s end-user experience from the grass-root level.
- Communication and Collaboration Development and Operations teams collaborate and become DevOps teams. Communication and collaboration are some of the key cultures of DevOps as a philosophy. When both the teams work closely in sync with each other, deployment to the production becomes faster. Establishing total transparency and smooth communication between both teams through integrated chat systems reduces misinterpretation throughout project work. Moreover, seamless communication between the development, operations, marketing, and sales teams strengthens the accountability and ownership of the application. Spotlight on DevSecOps DevOps environment coated with security is DevSecOps. To emphasize, DevSecOps is a process of securing every part of the DevOps life cycle through various strategies and policies.
It consists of design, development, maintenance, testing, builds, and release security. Security checks were done in earlier software development processes once the application was released for production. Due to this, backtracking issues were increased, and software delivery was pushed a lot. On the other hand, incremental development in the DevOps life cycle enables the application’s security at every iteration. Delivery at high velocity and secure code development is pipelined as a single process with DevSecOps in the picture. Altogether, adapting DevOps has become a necessity rather than a choice for big and small organizations. DevOps as a philosophy brings exponential growth, rapid delivery, great end-user experience, and much more. Jenkins, Puppet, Docker, Git, Chef, Nagios are various tools that are used to perform DevOps practices. Surprisingly there is a lack of DevOps experts in the market.
It is also challenging to develop DevOps’ culture in any organization quickly. Though DevOps is a once-in-a-lifetime investment practice that improves the growth of the business by 22% with 19% hikes in revenue annually. Implementing DevOps frameworks, processes, workflows, and DevSecOps adheres to the scaling of the application. Without sacrificing security with high-speed CI/CD pipeline integration.
The DevOps model reduces friction and lubricant between the two cross-functional teams. This brings self-organized work culture to the organization. Primarily, it provides a competitive and first-mover advantage for any product or service to the organization. DevOps mainly has changed the IT culture and focuses on rapid delivery to the consumer.
To summarize, the buzzword DevOps is the talk of the town. Still, many organizations and individuals have the wrong impression about DevOps, whether it is a software or product, or programming language!
DevOps is nothing but a development and operations team working together to achieve a single business goal in layman’s terms. DevOps adopts most agile methodologies to serve the industry in the long run.
By all means, DevOps is a value that an organization should cultivate to become successful at the end of the day. Subscribe to us for more such articles.