Let’s Talk about DevOps
The supercalifragilisticexpialidocious culture in the world of IT collaboration.
A very general explanation of DevOps is that it is the marriage of IT development and operations teams. It began as a movement and became a culture that has improved and continues to improve the quality of software of todays leading names such as Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix and much more by changing the dynamic in how teams interact and as a result create better user experiences.
Before the conversation of DevOps started, A business would typically have dev teams and Ops teams siloed or in other words, Isolated and working independently from one another. This isolation created “walls” of conflict between the multiple parties involved in the software development. Here’s how the process would go to create and deploy reliable software for a client:
- A client needs a technical solution(app, database, ect.)
- The client’s requirements are communicated to the development team and full stack software is developed.
- At the end of the dev process, the software is sent to the operations team, who then tests the user experience and handles release.
This sounds simple, but is a mess because those “walls” stifle the collaborative potential between developers, project managers, and contributors. This is ultimately ending up as a bad experience for the client. It’s slow.
Why DevOps is important
DevOps allows the developer to continuously deliver value to customers. Clients find bugs and they also may request new features. Instead of releasing a patch every so often or making the client wait for the next version of an app to be rid of bugs, DevOps empowers developers to implement positive change much faster. With DevOps, there is a constant communication between the dev and operations departments that improve efficiency in planning, developing, and deploying products, which at the end of the day is the development plan for any product. An example of what makes this a modern practice, is the usage of collaborative platforms such as Slack and Github. But wait there’s more:
CI/CD
The adoption of DevOps has allowed for the successful practice of CI/CD which stands for continuous integration and continuous development. CI/CD can be viewed as a pipeline for example, in which software devs continue to make incremental changes to code(CI) and that is swiftly delivered/deployed(CD)
CI/CD allows DevOps to bring things like scalability to the table.
Scalability is the ability for technologies like applications, storage, databases and networking to respond to the event of either a higher or lower demand of usage. The ability to increase or decrease resources as needed to ensure that those technologies continue to function properly when experiencing a change in size or user volume. Working together, DevOps teams can better implement scalability and other beneficial qualities to their projects.
Implementation
A Business needs the proper tools and technology to implement DevOps in their own spaces. There are tons of resources to do this, but for the the purpose of example, I’ll explain using the program suite of Microsoft’s DevOps solutions. The Programs of Microsoft’s suite handle different parts of the CI/CD process. Let’s see what each one does:
- Azure Boards is used in every part of the cycle. Is the “management hub” for projects where teams can track tasks in progress and their status, tasks to be done, user notations, the tracking of bugs that anyone might have noticed, ect.
- Azure Repos is for version Control like Github, but the difference is that Azure Repos is private rather than open source.
- Azure Pipeline used to create a type of pipeline (build, Release, etc.).
- Azure Artifacts allows a user to use or share public libraries (Like npm).
- Azure Test Plans manages testing of code on multiple browsers and sorts them into three test suites: query based, requirement based and static.
When I first heard of DevOps, I did not know how visualize what it is. A department? a field? a single software solution? No. It’s much more. The DevOps culture has shifted the paradigm of how developers approach the product lifecycle. As more businesses adopt this culture, developers find more opportunities to make their work worthwhile and more clients can rest assured that quality products are continuously being delivered to them.
