DevOps — Build faster, together
DevOps is a set of practices that make the software development lifecycle faster and more connected. It enables development and operations teams (IT) to work together instead of being separated into silos, only worried about their team and what they work on without being aware of other teams. It has many benefits and ultimately allows companies to focus more on innovating and hitting business goals while maintaining a feedback loop at every stage.
Making software and managing systems can be hard. Planning, creating, testing, releasing, and maintaining are all parts of this process of making software/services. Since we generally work in teams, we need some kind of way of managing each part, which a specific team may own — the testing team, for example — of the development lifecycle while working together on the bigger picture. DevOps is a methodology that allows us to bridge teams together and move rapidly through the software development lifecycle.
DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. It emphasizes team empowerment, cross-team communication and collaboration, and technology automation.
DevOps has many benefits, such as:
- Rapid Deployment: New features and bug fixes are continuously pushed out faster (could be hourly or daily).
- Security: A big focus on ensuring software and systems are secure throughout the process through automated testing and working with security teams.
- Scalability: Automation is heavily used in scaling infrastructure according to needs on a real-time basis. Cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure are key.
- Better Communication: Teams collaborate to give each other immediate feedback or discuss business needs and objectives.
- Automation: Using tools to do things such as testing code, deploying the latest features, spinning up servers when needed, and more are all done without human effort. This allows focusing on actual business needs and innovation instead of wasting time managing systems.
- Feedback loop: Customer and internal feedback are available at every process stage. Due to this, teams can adapt quicker to updated business and customer needs.
These are just a few of the benefits of DevOps. You can learn more here.
Case Study: Airbnb
In an industry where real-time price updates, user feedback, and responsiveness to issues are important, Airbnb has adopted DevOps principles to innovate, focus on business goals, and quickly catch/fix issues with their service.
What originally started as a Ruby monolith, Airbnb is now fully embracing microservices, cloud infrastructure using AWS, automation, and more tools to achieve continuous delivery and minimize human errors.
Airbnb has gone through a culture change in the process of adapting DevOps principles. Instead of having a core team that worries about scaling their old monolith architecture, every team is now tasked with knowing how to scale, deliver, and maintain the software.
Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Airbnb has depended heavily used tools such as AWS Cost & Usage Report to build pipelines which allow them to monitor and minimize cost while taking full advantage of tools such as Amazon EMR to process big loads of data and Savings Plans which allow you to commit to a specific amount of EC2 usage (instead of creating/spinning them up on demand) to lower cost.
To learn more about how Airbnb is utilizing AWS, check out this case study.
In summary, we must determine which practices and tools will allow us to work efficiently to build and maintain great products and services that will solve customers’ needs. Knowing how things can quickly change on a week-to-week basis (or even a day to day), we have to have practices that allow us to swiftly adapt to new needs, fix bugs, push updates, and monitor data in real-time. DevOps is a methodology that is trying to accomplish these things.
