Today’s digital transformation has turned almost every business into a software business. Your core mission might not be to produce high-quality software. But you may be leveraging it as a better way to manage your business process and cloud environments. Whatever your story is, DevOps can be of significant impact. Software runs on agile operations, continuous monitoring, and fast feedback. These collectively make the mainstay of DevOps.
As DevOps adoption keeps increasing in the software industry, many people who only thought of it as a buzzword are starting to change their mindset. Here’s a guide to the DevOps practice with details on its methodology and benefits if you’re ready to take the next step.
DevOps Defined
There has been an explosion in the use of the term DevOps. But beyond all the jargon by many product managers in such conversations, it’s vital to understand what is DevOps. Before we delve into the different ways to define this new term, telling the story from scratch can help the definition of DevOps a great deal.
In 2008, DevOps was only a discussion between IT professionals Andrew Clay and Patrick Debois. They wanted to move from the waterfall method to embrace the more beneficial agile software development. New insights from Flickr employees John Allspaw and Paul Hammond would influence Debois to host a Mecca of Dev and ops teams to further discussions.
The term became prominent in the IT World after the DevOpsDays event in Belgium. Software engineers began to see Agile Systems Administration as a better way to manage the software development lifecycle efficiently. According to the Right Scale ‘ State of DevOps report, over 70% of SMBs have now adopted DevOps methods. Different people use DevOps for different purposes.
The DevOps approach has become essential in today’s cloud computing era. Businesses have gone beyond seeing DevOps as a common tool but a cultural change that needs the onboarding of all employees. The DevOps mindset defines the responsibility of developers and operations people. The DevOps culture empowers modern DevOps to think in systems instead of working in silos.
It also affords ops teams the right tools to solve production issues in cloud environments. With DevOps tools, business stakeholders can improve the production deployment process and the overall performance of applications.
How it Works
DevOps combines software development with information technology operations. The process is a streamlined integration of complex systems originally housed under each of these two wings. DevOps implementation follows the following stages:
- Planning: Software building requires many routine tasks. Agile practitioners leverage DevOps automation to plan and manage tasks effectively.
- Coding: With every new code created, the software may use different code repositories. Without the integration of code repositories, developing efforts will continue to be independent of each other. This may have an adverse budget and uptime implication for IT teams. An integrated source code repository offers the best way to solve this disconnect in a DevOps environment.
- Building: The coding sanity of DevOps environments aids the continuous integration of software tools and outputs for system reliability. Ops teams can build with less time creating dependencies through an enterprise.
- Testing: Customer feedback is essential in the DevOps world. No one wants their business stakeholders to complain about a defect in the middle of the night. Test cycles in DevOps help to ensure customer satisfaction.
- Packaging: Tested software must favor customer requirements else they will fail. The packaging stage is where ops teams build artifacts and check for compatibility to business needs.
- Releasing: For every new release, business value and customer satisfaction must shoot to the next level. While this is the general rule, frequent releases often meet several infrastructural inefficiencies. In complex environments, it takes DevOps automation to ensure zero downtime.
- Operating: After all the compatibility checks in the production environment, the development team can go live with their products.
- Monitoring: Team members need monitoring efforts in capturing the need for any code change and continuous remediation after release.
Benefits of DevOps
Some benefits of DevOps include:
1. Faster Results
The DORA State of DevOps Report found that DevOps teams release products faster than traditional teams. DevOps teams have access to greater automation to deliver in less time, even on a lean budget.
2. Quality assurance
At the organizational level, the DevOps cultural shift heightens the need for effortless product release and software delivery in less time. For many IT teams, this is a great way to ramp up business value and customer satisfaction.
3. Better Security
Security teams with DevscOps can anticipate agile infrastructure threats faster and develop fixes in real-time. Quick security tests and actions help to ensure system reliability.
