DevOps Isn’t Just A Buzzword
Imagine you are a large company, and you have a deadline for a significant update for your software coming up. You notice that several team members are waiting for someone else to complete their task, and lines of communication are muddy. Then disaster hits when the deployment deploys the large batch of code. A long list of bugs stops the deployment in its tracks, pushing the release back by weeks, even months. How could this be prevented? Dev Ops, that’s how!
The DevOps’s Life Cycle
DevOps is a software development methodology that touches every part of the process, the culture, practices, and even the tools. It combines the development, testing, and operations teams into one, clearing the lines of communication and making them work closely together.
DevOps works in a continuous cycle with 8 phases, starting with the planning phase, identifying resources, mapping the product/service, and then coding the phase where the developers use the map from the prior phase into several modular code blocks. The code blocks in the building phase are submitted to a single repository, such as Github. In the build phase, automated testing tools such as Maven are used to find bugs and errors, and in the end, we get a usable build. This build is tested with automated tools such as Vagrant in a testing environment in the testing phase to ensure the product is secured, performed, and scales for the release. The release phase is where the product is now in its production environment and using tools such as Travis to ensure success and that hotfixes can be smoothly released. In the deploy phase, the product is fully in the hands of the end-users everything is live, which leads to our operation phase. In the operation phase, we collect user feedback to see where we can improve the product. The final phase is the monitor phase, where we use the data from the operation phase to chart the path for the next update.
DevOps In Action
A notable company that uses DevOps is the clothing retail giant Nordstrom. According to Techbeacon, Nordstrom used to spend years on a project just for it to be outdated on release. So they translated to a DevOps model, and the results were fewer bugs, throughput went up, and monthly releases. The results are night and day!
With DevOps, it’s a faster and more efficient way to develop applications and is beneficial for teams.
Thank you for reading my article! Feel free to leave any suggestions or thoughts in the comments section.
