Overview
DevOps is the perfect fusion of an organization’s culture, practices, and tools to increase its ability to deliver applications rapidly. This helps the business evolve and improve its products or services in comparison with the traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This agility allows organizations to serve their customers better and compete more effectively in the market.
What is DevOps ?
DevOps consists of the development and operations field, which has worked in a relay for many years. There has always been constant tension between developers who create code and IT professionals who run all of the infrastructure necessary to keep the performance at its peak. These departments traditionally do not mix well together, thus operating individually.
The DevOps movement started in 2007 by skilled software engineers who became concerned with traditional operations. They wanted to save time and reduce efficiency gaps by separating the engineering and deployment process. The term DevOps is a combination of words: Development Operations. DevOps integrates these previously disparate parts into a single source. Therefore, engineering and infrastructure work hand-in-hand in DevOps throughout the product cycle.
How DevOps works?
A DevOps team comprises experts from various fields collaborating to increase product development speed and quality throughout all project areas. DevOps gives businesses a more effective way of sending code to production, significantly shorter response times, and the product being less buggy!
Under this model, development, and operations teams no longer work separately. Instead, the experts from each department work together as one unified team. Sometimes, members possessing skills in more than one field also participate.
Development teams use specific tools to accelerate & automate processes and increase reliability. The DevOps toolchain enables teams to tackle crucial fundamentals, including automation, continuous integration (CI), collaboration, and continuous delivery (CD).
DevOps lifecycle
One of the most useful and commonly used representations of the DevOps lifecycle is the continuous flow represented in what is known as the Infinity Loop. Although it might appear to follow sequential order (Build-Test-Release-Monitor), it denotes the need for constant collaboration and iterative improvement throughout the entire process. Hence, this understanding is essential when using this diagram..
The lifecycle of DevOps has 6 phases that represent processes, capabilities, and the tools required for development and operations. At every stage, teams communicate and collaborate for efficiency.
Six phases of DevOps Lifecycle
Continuous Planning
DevOps teams can improve software delivery by adopting agile methodologies, specifically those that embrace lean development and DevOps principles. Agile is an iterative approach to software development and project management that helps your team break down their work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value promptly.
Building Collaboratively
Collaboration enables teams to stay on the same page and deliver continuously. Collaborative development includes the process of continuous integration. Every time there is a code update or merge, it creates an automatic build. Thus, the developers can link directly to the source code repository to see changes over time.
Continuous Integration and Delivery
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment, which software engineers use to make their jobs easier. It enables teams to iterate frequently and release efficiently.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring helps development teams to understand, identify, and resolve problems quickly to avoid impact on speed, product uptime, and functionality. It is essential to send your team automated notifications for changes, failures, and high-risk actions to keep your services up and running.
Operate
Managing the entire end-to-end delivery of your IT services is crucial. These services include the practices involved in the design, maintenance, deployment, configuration, and implementation of complete IT infrastructure supporting your organization’s goals.
Constant Feedback and Optimisation
DevOps engineers should always be looking for feedback. It is important to gather specific metrics from each release and pass them along to the product owners. This approach allows product owners to determine what changes would improve their company’s future iterations.
Feedback loops are integral aspects of a DevOps methodology. It will allow the team to evaluate how they work and determine whether or not their processes could use some retooling to facilitate product delivery better. Early feedback also reduces costs and helps steer projects in the right direction.
Tools used by DevOps Teams
DevOps tools often help communicate across teams, reduce the time it takes to perform a task, and improve communication through automation. All these aspects come under a process that helps facilitate collaboration between groups and technologies, especially regarding communication or project management.
Benefits of DevOps
Using the DevOps methods lets your team release faster, simpler, and safer. Using them helps to lower costs, and it makes your workflow more effective by avoiding some common problems like delays or security breaches of the code. DevOps ultimately results in happier customers and teams.
Improved collaboration
Collaboration is the heartbeat of DevOps. Developers and Operations teams make up the primary teams involved with this process. When everyone on both the operations and development team works together, they can spend less time figuring out where responsibility lies. Instead, they can spend more time building and coding and improving and creating and making things better by working together.
Speed and Rapid deployment
Like most teams these days, DevOps is all about speed. The goal is to work as quickly as possible. Teams that practice DevOps can deliver their product 106 times faster than low-performing teams! DevOps enables teams to build, test, and deliver their software using automated tools. They release features and repair bugs quickly.
Enhanced Quality
CI/CD practices make changes safe and functional, thus improving the software quality. Monitoring enables teams to stay informed of real-time performance.
Security
We should integrate security into DevOps. The development process relies heavily on the automation of development and production release flows. Security can often feel like an afterthought or behind-the-scenes activity. While it is important, the risk of missing security becomes even more prevalent today. By integrating security into a CI/CD pipeline, DevSecOps becomes an active part of the development process.
Reduce Time To Market
DevOps reduces the development time by streamlining processes and frequent iterations. It enables teams to identify errors quickly and correct them in time.
Why adopt DevOps ?
The popularity of DevOps is on the rise, making it a must-have for application development companies. DevOps enhances the collaboration between team members, increases efficiency, reduces failures, and improves job satisfaction.
By focusing on collaboration between development and operations, teams undergo rapid development and release cycles that give them a competitive advantage. IT companies that have already implemented DevOps have seen an enormous improvement in their overall productivity.
How to choose the best DevOps Tools?
First, you need to determine your project requirements. Does your IT environment have the conditions to support the DevOps tools you want to install? If you are a small business, a SaaS DevOps tool would be a good fit. However, if you have a sizable company, a Deployment as a Service or a PaaS DevOps tool would be a better choice.
First, you need to evaluate your business requirements and how you are going to use each tool. Some DevOps tools are more for group collaboration, while others suit personal purposes. Next, you need to make sure that your DevOps tools are compatible with your budget and the other tools in your business. Lastly, you need to make sure that your DevOps tools are compatible with each other.
Here are four things to keep in mind when choosing DevOps tools:
- Automate maximum tasks: Accuracy and speed are crucial to DevOps strategy. Automation tools can help increase both and make the processes easier to secure, audit, and improve.
- Eliminate silos: Siloed development and operations teams have been a thing since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In the past, the need for a separate operations team resulted from a lack of automation and a complicated manual deployment process requiring additional oversight and human resources. To get efficiency, companies need to eliminate silos. Companies can do this by constant communications and having common organizational objectives.
- Integrations and their compatibility: For automating processes, integrations play an essential role. There are several tools for integrations and automation available. Companies must check these integrations and their compatibility with one another.
- Use Cloud: DevOps and cloud computing go hand in hand. They both strive to tackle many of the same operational and development challenges that an organization might be facing. In a nutshell, DevOps on-premise seeks to provide a continuous delivery pipeline that uses the tools available on-premise for this purpose. On the other hand, cloud computing makes use of public services provided by third-party hosting providers. The difference is that there is no maintenance or upgrades required with a cloud platform since it constantly supplies new technologies. These technologies may often be part of a regular upgrade without intervention from a developer or a system administrator, which saves considerable technology expenditure.
In Conclusion
We had a quick glimpse on DevOps, various tools, and how to choose them. Have queries on why and how to implement DevOps in your business, need to know more on best DevOps tools or choose DevOps as a service, let’s talk and take the next steps to implement DevOps.
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