What is DevOps?
🔗 Embarking on a DevOps journey: where collaboration meets efficiency! 🚀 Join me as we explore the transformative realm of DevOps
What is DevOps?
DevOps is the blend of Development(Dev) and Operations(Ops) that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.
How does DevOps work?
A DevOps team includes developers and IT operations working collaboratively throughout the product lifecycle, in order to increase the speed and quality of software deployment. It an be best explained as people working together to conceive, build and deliver secure software at top speed. It enables teams to accelerate delivery through automation, collaboration, fast feedback, and iterative improvement.
DevOps teams use tools to automate and accelerate processes, which helps to increase reliability. A combination of different tools helps teams to handle important devOps fundamentals which includes continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).
The DevOps lifecycle
The DevOps approach embraces continuous innovation, agility, and scalability to build, test, consume, and evolve software products. Because of the continuous nature of DevOps, practitioners use the infinity loop to show how the phases of the DevOps lifecycle relate to each other.
To deliver faster results, developers must be fully aware of all the different phases of the DevOps lifecycle.
The DevOps Lifecycle Key Components
The DevOps lifecycle optimizes development processes from start to end and engages the organization in continuous development, resulting in faster delivery times. This process mainly consists of the following seven stages
Plan
DevOps teams should adopt agile practices to improve speed and quality. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams break work into smaller pieces to deliver incremental value.
Build
Package your applications and dependencies, manage containers, and build artifacts. In this workflow the new code is integrated into the existing code base, then tested and packaged into an executable for deployment
Test
Continuous integration (CI) allows multiple developers to contribute to a single shared repository. When code changes are merged, automated tests are run to ensure correctness before integration. Merging and testing code often help development teams gain reassurance in the quality and predictability of code once deployed.
Deploy
Continuous deployment (CD) allows teams to release features frequently into production in an automated fashion. Teams also have the option to deploy with feature flags, delivering new code to users steadily and methodically rather than all at once. This approach improves velocity, productivity, and sustainability of software development teams.
Operate
Manage the end-to-end delivery of IT services to customers. This includes the practices involved in design, implementation, configuration, deployment, and maintenance of all IT infrastructure that supports an organization’s services.
Monitor
Quickly identify and resolve issues that impact product uptime, speed, and functionality. Automatically notify your team of changes, high-risk actions, or failures, so you can keep services on.
Release
DevOps teams should evaluate each release and generate reports to improve future releases. By gathering continuous feedback, teams can improve their processes and incorporate customer feedback to improve the next release.
Benefits of DevOps
Adopting DevOps breaks down barriers so that development and operations teams are no longer siloed and have a more efficient way to work across the entire development and application lifecycle. The following are some of the benefits of DevOps.
Improved collaboration
Under a DevOps cultural model, the development and operations team blend. This reduces inefficiencies and saves time. Also, handoff friction is reduced and everyone is all in on the same goals and objectives.
Rapid Delivery
Improved efficiency and frequent communication between teams means new features and fix bugs can be released faster, the faster you can respond to your customers’ needs and build competitive advantage. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are practices that automate the software release process, from build to deploy.
Quality and reliability
Practices like continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) ensure changes are functional and safe, which improves the quality of a software product. Monitoring helps teams keep informed of system performance in real-time.
DevOps tools, concepts and fundamentals
DevOps covers a wide range of practices. The following practices are starting points for most teams
Continuous Integration (CI)
Continuous integration is the practice of automating the integration of code changes into a software project. It allows developers to frequently merge code changes into a central repository where builds and tests are executed.
Continuous delivery (CD)
Continuous delivery works in conjunction with continuous integration to automate the infrastructure provisioning and application release process. It follows a continuous delivery pipeline, where automated builds, tests, and deployments are orchestrated as one release workflow.
Agile
Agile development is taking iterative, incremental, and lean approaches to streamline and accelerate the delivery of systems.
Version control
The fundamental practice of tracking and managing every change made to source code and other files. Version control is closely related to source code management.
Shift left
The term “shift left” allows teams to shift security and testing in the earlier stages in development and minimize broken production changes.
Monitoring
DevOps teams monitor the entire development lifecycle. This allows teams to respond to any degradation in the customer experience, quickly and automatically.
Takeaway
Continuity is a very important factor when it comes to the DevOps lifecycle. Skipping any stage of the DevOps lifecycle will create a problem in the development system. Discontinuity will lead to untimely detection of bugs, hampering the overall performance of the software.
